Been thinking about songs, and categories of songs. Not quite genres, but categories that cut across genres. Like yeah, “love song” is a staple of crooner, R&B, and torch genres, but at the same time hard rockers do power ballads and gangsta rappers do slow jams. And in fact they’re kind of given a pass to cut directly against their usual image and output style there specifically because of the recognized crosscutting category.

Christmas songs. That’s an interesting one, it’s kind of the granddaddy of novelty music, people put out whole Christmas albums. Of course there’s an economic incentive, if you make it into the canon (last done by Mariah Carey I think) it’s basically royalties forever, and even if not well hey, come December even genre-specific distribution channels are expected to sprinkle in some - like, I know 0 other songs by The Waitresses.

Stripper songs - I hear the Atlanta strip clubs are a big part of breaking new rappers, but the hair rockers did a lot of songs for/about strippers too, and the nü metal/votechcore wave of the ’90s-2000s actually did this a lot better than their radio dirges.

The most marginal one of these categories I can think of is songs designed for a father/daughter dance at a wedding. Yet that still is an actual category, with hundreds of examples, even though I have no idea what the commercial angle would even be there.