Pick a genre. You get its real tempo — measured, not copied off a chart — and the genres that mix into it, which is the question the tempo is actually standing in for.
Genres cluster by tempo, and the clustering is tight: sixteen of the 27 genres we measured sit between 120 and 128 BPM. Inside that band, deep house, tech house, melodic house and techno, afro house and progressive are all within a pitch fader of each other, so "can I mix these" has the same answer for nearly every pair. The genre label is doing very little work.
Outside it, the label starts to matter — but only because tempo does. Drum and bass at 174 and hip-hop at 102 are hard to blend into a house set for exactly one reason, and it is not that they are a different genre. It is that the beats cannot be brought into agreement without a half-time or double-time move, or a cut. Check any two tempos →
We measured how often the next record stays in the same genre. The spread is the finding:
| Genre | Stays in genre | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Drum & Bass | 62% | Tempo isolates it — 174 is nowhere near the rest of the floor. |
| Trance | 58% | Same story at 138, plus a strong stylistic identity. |
| Bass House | 17% | Sits at a common tempo and works as a bridge. |
| Electronica | 16% | The most connective of all — it borders everything. |
A genre with a low number is not weaker, it is better connected. Those are the records that let you change direction without the floor noticing, which is most of what a transition between chapters is for. The full genre map →
The genres listed beside your pick are the ones a DJ building that kind of set would accept. It is a taste call, not a measurement — a curated map of which doors are worth opening, kept deliberately tight, because every neighbour is a door off-genre material walks through.
Read it as a starting shortlist rather than a permission list. Plenty of great transitions ignore it entirely, and the 30% figure above says most of them do.
Tempo is measured across a growing corpus of more than 70,000 published DJ sets, spanning four decades and 200+ genre labels. Two caveats worth carrying: catalogue tempo for drum and bass is frequently stored at half its real value, so a 174 record can be tagged 87 — the figures here are corrected. And the genre labels are the catalogue's, so a track filed wrongly is counted wrongly.
Constantly. Only about 30% of transitions in published DJ sets keep the next record in the same genre, so roughly seven times in ten a working DJ crosses a genre line. Genre is a much weaker constraint than tempo: what decides whether two records mix is whether the beats can agree, not whether a shop filed them under the same heading.
Genres that share a tempo range mix most easily, which is why the house family — deep house, tech house, melodic house and techno, afro house, progressive — interchanges so freely between about 120 and 128 BPM. Genres far from that range, drum and bass at 174 or hip-hop at 102, need a half-time or double-time move or a hard cut instead of a blend.
The ones whose tempo sits far from everything else. Drum and bass keeps the next record in genre 62% of the time and trance 58%, both because their tempo isolates them. The most connective are bass house at 17% and electronica at 16% — genres that sit at a common tempo and act as bridges between others.
What genres mix well together? · BPM by genre · Hot tracks by genre · Artist explorer
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