Genre of two songs

Question

The genre of Love Yourself by Justin Bieber is Dance/Electronic. But the genre of Dancing On My Own by Calum Scott is Pop.

They both are a bit sad and go slowly. So why are they considered different genres?

Answer 1

I got the same results as you when I googled Love Yourself Justin Bieber genre and Dancing On My Own Calum Scott genre, which is where I'm going to assume you got those songs' genres from.

However, when I went to the Wikipedia pages for the songs, both "Love Yourself" and "Dancing On My Own" have a genre of Acoustic Pop.

In addition, AllMusic said that both "Love Yourself" and "Dancing On My Own" have a genre of Pop/Rock.

According to iTunes, they're both Pop. And Discogs says they're both Pop too. And so does Genius.

So what's the takeaway here? Well, it could be one of a few things.

Google is wrong.

Certainly a possibility, as none of these other sources seems to say that the genre of "Love Yourself" is Electronic or Dance.

Maybe genres are, in a lot of ways, meaningless?

This excellent answer on another question on this site details the history of genres, and how they were created for marketing purposes and to segregate artists by race. And this other excellent answer describes the difference between Soul, Funk, and R&B as genres and how some artists identified as "Funk" bands but no artists really identified as "R&B" bands.

In this case, Google is probably wrong, but it's definitely good to keep in mind that the genre a specific website, record label, radio station, or magazine might put on a song might be completely different from what genre a similar entity (or even the artist themselves) might put on the song.