Music Genres as Historical Individuals

Abstract

Musicians, listeners, and record labels sort music into genres such as jazz, punk, heavy metal, and so on. Metaphysically, what kind of thing is a genre? This paper explores the idea that music genres are historical individuals. The obvious way to develop this is to think of a music genre as being like a biological species. Although that approach has much to recommend it, we argue that it faces an insuperable difficulty: what we dub the problem of independent origins. We argue, instead, that a genre is a historical individual governed by an institution or social practice.