Terms of Use

Last updated: 14 August 2026

Who we are

genredive.com is operated by Curious Ear Media LLC, a Colorado limited liability company trading as Genre Dive. In these terms, “we” and “us” mean Curious Ear Media LLC, and “the site” means genredive.com and its subdomains.

By using the site you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, please do not use it.

What you can do with what you find here

We would like people to read this, share it and argue with it. So, without asking us:

read anything on the site, obviously;
link to any page, including deep links to individual episodes and genres;
quote us, in reasonable extract, with attribution to Genre Dive and ideally a link;
cite the site in writing, research or teaching.

If you want to do something more than that, ask. We are generally happy to say yes to things that are interesting, and the address is at the bottom.

What we ask you not to do

The written material on this site — the episode writeups, the genre descriptions, the notes on why a track was included — took a long time to produce. The genre data behind the Genre Explorer took longer.

So please do not:

republish substantial parts of the site, whether or not you credit us;
copy the genre data, in whole or in substantial part, or incorporate it into another dataset, product or service;
scrape the site, or use automated means to retrieve content in bulk;
use anything here to train, fine-tune or evaluate a machine learning model.

Genre data and the Genre Explorer

The Genre Explorer presents a dataset of music genres and the relationships between them: which genres descend from which, which are siblings, which influenced which. This dataset is our editorial work, and its selection, arrangement and written descriptions are ours.

No licence is granted in respect of it. All rights are reserved. It is published so that people can explore it, not so that it can be taken.

If you want to use the data for research, teaching, or a non-commercial project, write to us — the answer is quite likely to be yes, and we would rather grant permission than find out later.

Automated access, crawling and AI training

We publish a robots.txt and an llms.txt file setting out which automated agents may access which parts of this site.

Those files are terms of this agreement, not suggestions. Accessing the site by automated means in a way those files disallow is a breach of these terms, whatever the technical convention may be.

Separately, and whether or not you obtained the material by crawling: you may not use any part of this site to train, fine-tune, evaluate or otherwise develop a machine learning model, including a large language model, without our written permission. This applies to the written content, the genre data and the site’s code alike.

We are not against machines reading this site. Search engines are welcome, and so are assistants that answer a question and cite where the answer came from. The line we are drawing is at absorbing this work into a model that then reproduces it without attribution.

Trade marks

GENRE DIVE and the Genre Dive wordmark are trade marks of Curious Ear Media LLC.

Things on this site that are not ours

Genre Dive episodes feature commercially released music. Those recordings and the compositions behind them belong to their rights holders, not to us. Nothing here grants you any right in them.

Episode audio is streamed from Mixcloud, and episode pages embed Mixcloud’s player. We link out to Apple Music, Spotify, Discogs, Bandcamp and elsewhere. We are not responsible for those sites, their content, their availability or their terms — when you follow a link or use an embedded player, you are dealing with them.

The usual disclaimers

We try to get things right. Music history is contested, sources disagree, and we will sometimes be wrong. The site is provided as is, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including as to accuracy, completeness, fitness for a particular purpose or uninterrupted availability.

To the fullest extent the law allows, Curious Ear Media LLC is not liable for any indirect, incidental, consequential or special damages arising from your use of the site, and our total liability for any claim relating to the site is limited to one hundred United States dollars.

Nothing in these terms limits any liability that cannot lawfully be limited.