In North American music, adult contemporary music (AC) is a form of radio-played popular music. Adult contemporary tends to have lush, soothing and highly polished qualities where emphasis on melody and harmonies is accentuated. It is usually melodic enough to get a listener's attention, and is inoffensive and pleasurable enough to work well as background music. Like most of pop music, its songs tend to be written in a basic format employing a verse chorus structure.[8] The format is heavy on romantic sentimental ballads which mostly use acoustic instruments (though bass guitar is usually used) such as acoustic guitars, pianos, saxophones, and sometimes an orchestral set.

An album is a collection of audio recordings issued as a collection (minimum 3 songs). An album may be recorded in a recording studio (fixed or mobile), in a concert venue, at home, in the field, or a mix of places.

Blues as a genre is also characterized by its lyrics, bass lines, and instrumentation. Early traditional blues verses consisted of a single line repeated four times. It was only in the first decades of the 20th century that the most common current structure became standard: the AAB pattern, consisting of a line sung over the four first bars, its repetition over the next four, and then a longer concluding line over the last bars. Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative,

Country music often consists of ballads and dance tunes with generally simple forms, folk lyrics, and harmonies mostly accompanied by string instruments such as banjos, electric and acoustic guitars, steel guitars (such as pedal steels and dobros), and fiddles as well as harmonicas.

Electronic dance music (EDM), also known as dance music, club music, or simply dance,[1] is a broad range of percussive electronic music genres made largely for nightclubs, raves and festivals. It is generally produced for playback by DJs who create seamless selections of tracks, called a mix, by segueing from one recording to another.

A person who sings, with a group or as an individual who play popular music.

A singer who specializes in folk songs, usually providing their own accompaniment on a guitar.

Heavy metal (or simply metal) is a genre of rock music that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, largely in the United Kingdom and the United States.  With roots in blues rock, psychedelic rock, and acid rock the bands that created heavy metal developed a thick, massive sound, characterized by highly amplified distortion, extended guitar solos, emphatic beats, and overall loudness. 

Hip hop music, also known as rap music,[5] is a genre of popular music. It consists of a stylized rhythmic music that commonly accompanies rapping, a rhythmic and rhyming speech that is chanted.[7] It developed as part of hip hop culture, a subculture defined by five key stylistic elements: MCing/rapping, DJing/scratching with turntables, break dancing, graffiti writing, and customized cars.[8][9][10] Other elements include sampling beats or bass lines from records (or synthesized beats and sounds), and rhythmic beatboxing. While often used to refer solely to rapping, "hip hop" more properly denotes the practice of the entire subculture.

Indigenous music is a term for the traditional music of the indigenous peoples of the world, that is, the music of an "original" ethnic group that inhabits any geographic region alongside more recent immigrants who may be greater in number.

An instrumental is a recording without any vocals, although it might include some inarticulate vocals, such as shouted backup vocals in a Big Band setting. Through semantic widening, a broader sense of the word song may refer to instrumentals.[1][2][3] The music is primarily or exclusively produced using musical instruments.

Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation

A person who sings, with a group or as an individual who play popular music.

A videotaped performance of a recorded popular song, usually accompanied by dancing and visual images interpreting the lyrics.

An individual artist who is applying to the awards for the first time!

A group of artists who sre applying to the awards for the first time!

an invidual artist who writes and performs their own music

a group who writes and performs their own music!

An original means it is the first recorded version. This means it is performed by the person who wrote it, or the person it was written for.

The punk subculture is centered on a loud, aggressive genre of rock music called punk rock, usually played by bands consisting of a vocalist, one or two electric guitarists, an electric bassist, and a drummer. In some bands, the musicians contribute backup vocals, which typically consist of shouted slogans, choruses, or football-style chants.

Rock music is a broad genre of popular music that originated as "rock and roll". For instrumentation, rock has centered on the electric guitar, usually as part of a rock group with electric bass, drums, and one or more singers. Usually, rock is song-based music with a 4/4 time signature using a verse chorus form, but the genre has become extremely diverse.

World music is a collective musical category that includes a wide variety of traditional and folk music styles from around the world, especially non-western music genres, as well as their hybrids and modern interpretations of their traditional style.