Picture the last time someone told you that electronic music genres all sound the same. Maybe it was a cousin at a wedding, or a friend who owns exactly one dance album. You wanted to explain that pulse of a warehouse in Detroit and the sunlit swing of an Ibiza terrace are cousins, not twins; that drum & bass and hardcore share a great-grandparent; that this music, born out of Black, queer and Latinx communities in Chicago, New York and Detroit, grew into a family tree rather than a flat list of names you are supposed to memorise.
Now you can just show them.
The Electronic Music Web is live at an interactive map of the electronic music genres that built the culture we play. It holds 142 genres, grouped into 9 families, threaded together by 374 documented connections and anchored by 426 defining tracks you can play right there on the page.
It is free, it needs no account, and the whole thing runs on a single data file.
The problem with a genre list
Search for electronic music genres and you get Wikipedia’s wall of blue links, or a streaming service’s mood tags, or a Reddit comment that starts an argument. None of them show you the shape of the thing. They name the destinations but not the roads between them, so the scene looks like a hundred unrelated islands instead of one continent with rivers running through it.
That matters if you are a DJ. You cannot build a set that travels if you do not know where a genre came from, who it borrowed from, and what it was reacting against. Knowing that a track is “just house” tells you nothing about whether it will sit next to a broken beat, a Chicago vocal, or a Berlin loop at 3am.
The EWeb is the answer. It treats electronic music the way it actually exists: as a web of descent, influence and fusion, with every claim attached to a source.
What is actually on the Electronic Music Web
Every figure below was counted from the live dataset on 5 October 2026. This is the honest shape of the project, not a launch-day rounding.
| Metric | What is on the site |
|---|---|
| Genres | 142, each with its own page |
| Families | 9 colour-coded groups |
| Defining tracks | 426, exactly three per genre |
| Connections in the graph | 374 |
| Source citations | 334 references to 242 unique URLs from 79 publishers |
| Key figures named | 565 entries, 496 unique artists, producers and groups |
| Labels named | 424 entries, 326 unique labels |
| Places of origin | 223 entries across 66 cities in 22 countries |
| Era covered | first releases from 1968 to 2015 |
| Tempo range | 60 to 600 BPM, with a typical range of 75 to 300 |
| History written | roughly 22,300 words, about 157 per genre |
| Backend | none. No database, no accounts, no audio hosting |
The entire site is generated from one web.json file of about 713 KB, which compresses to roughly 165 KB over the wire. Your browser fetches it once, caches it, and draws the whole map from there.
Nine families, 142 electronic music genres
The map is built from nine families. Each has its own colour and its own centre of gravity, from the four-to-the-floor pulse of house to the fast, broken pressure of drum & bass.
| Family | Genres mapped | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| House | 34 | Chicago, New York, London, Johannesburg |
| Techno | 24 | Detroit, Berlin, London, Birmingham |
| Roots | 15 | New York, London, Dusseldorf, Kingston and the styles that came first |
| Trance | 14 | Frankfurt, London, Tel Aviv, Goa |
| Hardcore | 14 | Rotterdam, London, Amsterdam, New York |
| Hard Dance | 13 | Amsterdam, London, Antwerp, Cologne |
| Drum & Bass | 12 | London, Bristol, Groningen |
| UK Bass | 9 | London, Sheffield, Leeds, Croydon |
| Breakbeat | 7 | London, Orlando, Brighton |
House is the biggest family because it is the most travelled. It runs from deep house to tech house and acid house, and it is where the map’s oldest threads meet the newest. Techno carries the machine-made lineage from Detroit outward. The decade breakdown is just as revealing: 3 genres trace their first releases to the 1960s, 7 to the 1970s, 19 to the 1980s, then a burst of 72 in the 1990s, 24 in the 2000s and 17 in the 2010s.
374 connections: descent, influence and fusion
The lines between the nodes are the point. Each one is typed, so you can see whether a genre grew out of another, borrowed from it, or was assembled from several at once.
| Connection type | Count | Example of what it means |
|---|---|---|
| Influenced by | 202 | A style borrowed a sound, a tempo or a mood without splitting off |
| Evolved from | 125 | A direct descendant, the trunk of the family tree |
| Fusion of | 40 | Two or more lineages meeting to make a new one |
| Regional variant | 4 | The same genre reshaped by a local scene |
| Revival of | 2 | A later generation returning to an older sound |
| Reaction to | 1 | A genre defined by pushing back against another |
Follow those edges and the arguments dissolve. Drum & bass sits downstream of jungle and hardcore; jungle sits downstream of breakbeat hardcore and reggae soundsystem culture; the UK bass family branches into speed garage, 2-step, bassline, dubstep and grime. You stop asking “what is this?” and start asking “where did this come from?”, which is the better question.
Every genre is a real page, not a tooltip
Click any node and you get a full panel; open its dedicated page and you get something worth sharing. Each /g/ page carries the genre’s history, its defining sounds, its key figures and labels, its tempo and place of origin, and three embedded tracks chosen to show the style rather than just name it. The history text carries numbered source links, so you can trace any sentence back to what supports it.
There is also a decade timeline that animates the same graph from the 1960s forward, which is the fastest way to see the 1990s explosion for yourself. Search and family filters let you pull one thread out of the tangle when you want to go deep. Every page is server-rendered, so a genre page returns its full history and track list even with JavaScript switched off.
The research under the hood
A map is only as good as its sources, so we treated this like a partial editorial project. The dataset was built in 11 research batches, each followed by a separate reviewer pass that re-checked facts, videos and links (hopefully they are right :))
That process found real problems and fixed them.
In the second wave alone, 49 files were corrected. Fifteen genres that had leaned on a single publisher were given a second, openable source and the history was rewritten to cite it. More than thirty unused sources were either used or removed.
Every one of the 426 track years was re-examined, first against Discogs and MusicBrainz, then by a research AI agent reading Wikipedia and Wikidata; 424 landed within a two-year tolerance and the handful outside it were corrected. All 426 primary tracks and 369 backup uploads were checked through YouTube’s oEmbed endpoint, and the dead or non-embeddable ones were replaced or flagged.
The site is honest about what it cannot settle too. More than a hundred contested points are kept as visible open questions instead of being quietly smoothed over, and the about page explains how dates are chosen. We would rather show you the seams than pretend there are none.
Built to disappear
Because there is no database, the whole thing is also easy to inspect and reuse. The dataset is published at /web.json with a JSON Schema, the pages carry DefinedTerm structured data for search engines, and the project ships an /llms.txt file so language models can read the same data. It passed Lighthouse with 100 for SEO and 100 for accessibility. The entire build is 155 pages, and the only thing flowing to your browser is one cached file.
Where to start
Three ways in, depending on what you already know.
- If you know house and want the family: start at the map and click the house cluster, then follow the “influenced by” edges outward.
- If you want the origin story: open the Roots family, then the timeline, and watch the 1980s turn into the 1990s.
- If you want the heavy end: jump to jungle, drum & bass or happy hardcore and trace the breakbeat spine.
From there, the listening is on you. If you want to turn a map into a set, our guide on building a DJ set is the natural next read, and if you want to dig the records behind these names, start with digging for underground music. When you are ready to build a library around these branches, Building a Great DJ Music Library is the companion I would hand you next.
The Web is best-effort and it will keep growing. If you spot a missing genre, a wrong year or a track that should not be there, the pages carry a correction path, and we would rather hear it than not.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Electronic Music Web?
It is a free interactive map of electronic music genres at eweb.learningtodj.com. Each genre is a node you can open, read and share, and the lines between them show how styles influenced, evolved from or fused with one another.
How many electronic music genres are on it?
There are 142 genres across 9 families, connected by 374 typed links and illustrated by 426 defining tracks, exactly three per genre. The list runs from disco and electro through house, techno, trance, hardcore, hard dance, breakbeat and drum & bass to UK bass and dubstep.
Is the Electronic Music Web free?
Yes. There is no account, paywall or app to install. It is a static page, so it loads quickly and works on a phone; the track embeds only start when you press play.
Where do the facts come from?
Every genre cites numbered sources drawn from 242 URLs across 79 publishers, re-checked in a separate review pass. Track years were cross-referenced against Discogs, MusicBrainz and Wikidata, and the remaining contested points are shown as open questions rather than hidden.
What is the difference between house and techno?
Broadly, house grew out of Chicago’s disco and soul lineage with a warmer, vocal-friendly four-to-the-floor, while techno came from Detroit’s machine music, colder and more futuristic. In the map they meet at early hybrids but branch into different families, and you can trace every influence line between them.
Can I use the data in my own project?
Yes. The full dataset is published as web.json with a JSON Schema and structured data on the pages, so researchers, educators and developers can reuse it. Credit and a link back are appreciated.
Go and get lost in it for half an hour. Then come back and tell us which line surprised you most; that is the whole reason we built it.
