People ask me, fairly often, how all of this fits together. Someone hears a Peggy Gou record, likes it, works out it’s “house,” and then immediately hits the wall every newcomer hits: house has children. Deep house, tech house, acid house, garage house, Afro house, soulful house. And those have children too. Within a couple of clicks they’re staring at “liquid neurofunk” wondering how on earth it’s related to disco.
It’s related to disco. Everything here is related to disco, or to funk, or to soul, the three roots that everything electronic grows out of. That’s the thing the genre arguments always miss: dance music isn’t a list of styles, it’s a family. Each sound came from a specific city on a specific night out of specific machines, and it carries the DNA of whatever came before it.
So I mapped the whole family.
What the map shows
The Dance Music Tree now maps 176 genres in 14 families, each placed at the year it took shape. The eras below are still a useful way to read it:
- Roots, Funk, Soul, Disco. The source material.
- First wave (1978 to 88), House out of Chicago, Techno out of Detroit, Electro, early Ambient. The machines arrive.
- Rave era (1988 to 96), Acid house ignites everything; hardcore, jungle, trance, the UK explosion.
- Post-rave (1996 to 2008), Drum and bass splinters, UK garage splits into grime and dubstep, minimal techno, big beat.
- Digital era (2008, now), EDM, future bass, footwork, amapiano (now arguably the fastest-growing genre globally, crossing out of South Africa into mainstream festival circuits worldwide), hyperpop, and the Seoul scenes I write about from the inside.
Each node connects to the ones that produced it. You can follow a single line, disco → garage house → UK garage → 2-step → grime, and watch a sound mutate across decades and continents without ever fully breaking from its parent.
→ Explore the interactive Dance Music Tree
Why a tree and not a list
Because the connections are the actual history, and a list hides them. If you’re in Seoul, the quickest way to hear the Korean end of the tree is to compare a K-pop house single with a deep house record from the 1990s; the chords and the steady kick are the family resemblance.
Take drum and bass. As a list entry it’s just “fast breakbeat music, ~170 BPM.” As a branch on the tree, it’s the thing that happened when hardcore rave got too fast for its own breakbeats and producers started chopping the Amen break into something more precise, with jungle’s ragga-influenced roughness coming first, by 1994, and drum and bass proper emerging around 1995 before splitting into the smoother liquid and darker neurofunk strains. You can’t see any of that in a definition. You can see all of it on the map.
It also makes the regional story legible. Techno is Detroit. House is Chicago. Jungle, garage, grime, dubstep, UK bass. That entire dense cluster is Britain. The tree has Korean branches too, from K-pop and Korean hip hop to K-pop house, because that lineage is still being written, and I’m one of the few people writing it down.
Where to start if you’re new
Don’t try to absorb all 176 at once. Start at a node you already like, then walk backwards, follow the lines to its parents until you hit one of the three roots. Do that two or three times and the whole structure clicks into place, because you stop seeing genres and start seeing a single continuous story.
That story, by the way, is now worth $15.1 billion a year globally in 2025, up 7 percent on the year, according to the IMS Business Report 2025/26. The industry grew out of a borrowed drum machine in a Detroit basement. The map starts at disco. That lineage is worth knowing.
Related: Techno: From Detroit to the Dancefloor · UK Garage: The Sound That Split Into Everything · The Genre Encyclopedia →
Frequently Asked Questions
How are dance music genres related to each other?
Dance music works as a family rather than a list of styles, and every genre traces back to three roots: funk, soul and disco. Each sound came from a specific city on a specific night out of specific machines, and it carries the DNA of what came before it. A single line such as disco to garage house to UK garage to 2 step to grime shows a sound mutating across decades without fully breaking from its parent.
How many dance music genres are there on the family tree?
The Dance Music Tree now maps 176 genres in 14 families. Read by era, it runs from the roots, a first wave from 1978 to 1988, the rave era from 1988 to 1996, post rave from 1996 to 2008, and the digital era from 2008 onward. For a view organised by speed instead, see the guide to how fast each genre is.
Where did house, techno and drum and bass come from?
House came out of Chicago and techno out of Detroit in the first wave of electronic dance music. Drum and bass grew from hardcore rave when it got too fast for its own breakbeats and producers began chopping the Amen break into something more precise. Jungle’s ragga influenced roughness came first, and drum and bass proper then split into the smoother liquid and darker neurofunk strains.
How should a beginner start learning dance music genres?
Start at a genre you already like and walk backwards, following the lines to its parents until you reach one of the three roots. Repeating that two or three times makes the structure click, because you stop seeing separate genres and start seeing one continuous story. Trying to absorb all 56 genres at once is the wrong approach.
Further Reading
- Wikipedia: an overview of electronic dance music
- Wikipedia: funk, one of the three roots of the tree
- Wikipedia: house music and its Chicago origins
- Wikipedia: techno and its Detroit origins
- Wikipedia: drum and bass and its many subgenres
Written from Seoul, by someone who has been in the booth for more than twenty years. More on the site, or book a DJ.
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