Image: Wikimedia Commons

alternative rock

Subgenre of rock music

Also known as alt-rock · alt rock

Instance of: music genre
2
Sources
1.Stated in Rate Your Musicrateyourmusic.com/genre/Alternative+Rock/
2.“Genre List - MusicBrainz”musicbrainz.org/genres#content
View statement on Wikidata ↗
, radio format
Subclass of: rock music
1
Sources
1.Stated in Rate Your Musicrateyourmusic.com/genre/Rock/
View statement on Wikidata ↗
, alternative music
Founded: 1978

Overview

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia · Read full article · Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Alternative rock is a category of rock music that evolved from the independent music underground of the 1970s. Alternative rock acts achieved mainstream success in the 1990s with the likes of the grunge subgenre in the United States, and the Britpop and shoegaze subgenres in the United Kingdom and Ireland. During this period, many record labels were looking for "alternatives", as many corporate rock, hard rock, and glam metal acts from the 1980s were beginning to grow stale throughout the music industry. The emergence of Generation X as a cultural force in the 1980s and 1990s also contributed greatly to the rise of alternative music.

Overview

All data

38 statements · 24% with external sources · numbers in brackets are citations

Country of origin: United States
United Kingdom
Has characteristic: rock genre
Different from: alternative music

On other databases

27 identifiers linking alternative rock across the web's reference databases

Data quality

statements

24%

externally sourced

Source last edited September 28, 2026. AIDB refreshes this page daily.

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AIDB. (2026). alternative rock (Q11366). Retrieved from https://aidb.si/e/alternative-rock-Q11366