Why? Because the purpose of genres is to be able to find new music aligned with your taste. I pick these because if I search music by genres, with these there's a high probability that even generic "crap" songs will be listenable. If I search "gothic" or "industrial", there would be a lot of stuff I wouldn't want to listen to even if most of my favorite bands fall into this category.
These three genres were favorites of my long-gone parents and four older sisters - - good memories.
Big Band music of the late 30s into the 40s like Tommy Dorsey's "Well Git It" and Count Basie's "Jumpin' at the Woodside".
Mid to late 50s Rock 'n' Roll like "High School Confidential" by Jerry Lee Lewis and Gene Vincent's "Be Bop A Lula".
Well known classical orchestral music featuring either solo violin like Tchaikovsky's "Violin Concerto in D major" or solo piano like Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue".
Pop, R&B, rock/nu-metal. I like eighties and ninties music, some groups or singers that I like Kate bush, the cranberries, Roxette, INXS, Beyonce, Limp Bizkit Linkin Park
Prog/art rock, new wave, and classical - mostly romantic. I just love deep intense music where you can just sit down, relax, and know that it gets even better the more you listen to it
Rock folk and believe it or not bluegrass , add blues to the rock side . Folk is people like John Prine,Gregory Isakov . Bluegrass because it requires lots of harmony and talent.
Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, and Paul Simon! Yeah, I know those folks all play in multiple genres (it could be said that Dylan defines his own genre). I'm not sure I fit into standard genres.
Why? Probably because that's what was in the air when I started becoming aware of popular music. There's really no accounting for taste.
I like a variety. I usually end up listening to what’s being played on the radio because I don’t like thinking about what I want to play. But if I am choosing, I usually end up listening to oldies like 60s music, 90s rock or early 2000s rock
So-called "classical", which of course includes Classical; plus 1960s-70s rock and 1960s pop, and traditional folk.
The loose term "classical" with small 'c' covers a gigantic, centuries-wide spread of secular and sacred, instrumental and vocal music from Mediaeval to Rennaisance, on to Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modern and up to Contemporary - the last being music written now.
Though I find the really avant-garde creations uninspiring, even pointless. I find some of the strictly Classical sonatas a bit dry and academic - I admire the skill needed to write and play them though.
Many Baroque pieces evoke the B adjectives: the big, bright, brassy, bouncy Baroque. (Its contemporay Lutheran and Catholic traditions inspired a lot of deeply sacred music, but many of the secular Baroque pieces were course, composed as unashamedly for entertainment and for money, as anything now.)
My favourite orchestral works are from the Romantic and Modern style eras.
My tastes are far wider than that though, to include some jazz, blues, brass bands, organ music, and a lot of the symphonic music written for films and video games. (I've seen few if any of the films and have never played a computer game!).
# # #
On the opposite side, most Big Band arrangements, American crooning, rap, dance-club styles, anything sampled and the manufactured chart stuff now made, all leave me cold.
