I'm still a new to the music world, and i'm not familiar with all kinds of musics.
I mean how do we distinguish jazz, hip pop, rap, R&B, blue?
Sometimes i can divide a few between the others..
newage and classical are quite easy to be distinguished from the others though..

Here i'm asking for some help..
how do we distinguish those musics?
any features?

i've tried to search once..but i really don't know what to put into the input box.

thanks for your help first..

In some ways that is a good question, a lot of the times I do not know what genre a song would be but lets see..

hip hop is not quite as.. I do not know its hard to explain, and I am not a rap / hiphop guy.

Perhaps someone else shall try to help me out and explain it.

i just attempted to define everything, but then realised it's probably a waste of time. my advice is to listen to all these genres to be able to tell the difference. there are clear differences with most things, but words tend to not tell the whole story. for example, i completely failed to define jazz, even though it's very easy to pick when it's heard.

with modern music, a lot of bands are trying to not allow themselves to be classified in any genre and to stand alone as makers of music. i find that attitude more than a little self-indulgent and wanky, to be honest. of course it's fine to be creative and original, but when you consider that genres are practically meaningless anyway, it doesn't make too much sense to be annoyed at being "pigeon-holed" into one.

to me genres are just the place you look for a CD in a music store. and usually they vary in what they like to call everything, so in the end you just have to ask an assitant "where do i find this band?".

for example, when you put a CD into EAC and click the "get CD info from CDDB" button, you'll most probably get a list of exact matches with all different genres (some of which are way off the mark).

It's very difficult to define, and is different from person to person.
For me the music is a life style, my personal feelings and emotions are very sensitive to this phenomenon.

Give wikipedia a try. I've looked at the Hip Hop and the Jazz article for example and they are a very interesting read.

I personally think that musical genres are best defined by a few key artists. My exposure to these genres can be considered limited so I can only suggest some who have made it to commercial fame.

AFAIK there is no useful distinction between Rap and Hip Hop. Listen to Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, Cypress Hill, MC Hammer.

I think with R&B you mean "Nu Soul" stuff. (Which I personally hate dislike). Try Destiny's Child, Aaliyah.

I have never heard of blue

Jazz is definitely very distinct from the others. It is much older and is considered to be the first musical genre developed in the USA. Usually it is performed by musicians playing an instrument. Try Miles Davis.

You'd have better luck asking me about genres of electronica.

I agree with Gecko that a Genre is defined (or transformed for genres who haven't been around for long enough) by key artists/records.
A very good/useful approach is shown by the What the heck is emo anyway? website, which consists of the right mix of history, style and key records.

You might want to look at AllMusic (http://www.allmusic.com/) and click on Explore By Genre. They've attempted to describe some of them. Their list used to be ridiculously long; they've pared it down some, thankfully.

http://www.di.fm/edmguide/ check out Iskur's guide to electronic music! it's the most comprehensive on the internet whenever you are trying to describe certain genre of electronic music. The guide serves to be quite a humourous introduction coming from a veteran, such as himself. Their is in fact a big distinction between hip hop and rap. For one thing commercial rap is "gangsta rap" here in U.S as opposed to other more "intelligent" and interesting style's like instrumental hip hop and underground. Check out the list and then get back to us if you need anymore assistance, as for jazz I am big fan. In fact I like all forms of music, in the electronic genre jazzstep and acid jazz are among my personal favorites!. If you are referring to classic jazz (Charlie Parker, Ella Fitzgerald, etc) and smooth jazz you might want to check out some other guides.