Internet music

Internet music (also known as online music or digital music) is a style of music influenced by Internet culture and practices that originated from or were significantly shaped by the Internet, as well as encompassing a wide range of genres and music scenes that have developed primarily online, often outside traditional music industry structures.

The earliest roots of music made or distributed on the Internet can be traced back to the late 1980s and early 1990s amongst the tracker music community and "demoscene". By the 2000s, several music scenes and genres would proliferate on the Internet through the early online blogosphere, most notable were hypnagogic pop, shitgaze, blog rock, bloghouse and blog rap. By the end of the decade, chillwave emerged as the first music genre to develop primarily on the Internet, followed by vaporwave. Several online music styles later emerged as microgenres frequently tied to specific internet aesthetics.

Additionally, online forums and blog sites such as Blogspot, Last.fm, 4chan, Tumblr and Reddit alongside early social media platforms MySpace and mixtape-sharing site DatPiff helped provide early forms of independent online musical distribution, later followed by SoundCloud, YouTube, Spotify and TikTok.