The Netherlands has multiple musical traditions. Contemporary Dutch popular music is heavily influenced by music styles that emerged in the 1950s, in the United Kingdom and United States. The style is sung in both Dutch and English. Some of the latter exponents, such as Golden Earring and Shocking Blue, have attained worldwide fame.

Sometimes partly based and raised upon the tradition of Indorock, new acts with a mixture of Mainstream pop music, Dance, Jazz, Funk and Soul emerged in the mid-1980s. Many of them were and still are performing in and/or outside The Netherlands, and some of them gained (international) recognition, which would sometimes also result in a collaboration with major players from the United States or United Kingdom. An early example of these is Massada, a band with strong Moluccan roots, in the tradition of Santana. Some of the most successful artists among them were Mai Tai, Lois Lane, working with Prince, Julya Lo'ko, and saxophone player Candy Dulfer, also working with Prince, Dave Stewart and Pink Floyd. The mid-1990s saw the rise of Total Touch, with singer Trijntje Oosterhuis.

Another popular genre of Dutch music is known as "Levenslied", meaning "Song of/about life". These songs have catchy, simple rhythms and melodies, and are always built up on choruses and verses. Themes are often sentimental and include love, death and loneliness. Traditional Dutch musical instruments such as the accordion and the barrel organ are essential to levenslied, though in recent years many levenslied artists also use synthesizers and guitars. Artists in this genre include Koos Alberts and the late André Hazes and Willy Alberti.

Dutch techno, hardstyle, gabber, trance and other styles in electronic dance music (EDM) spread globally. Many popular DJs in the EDM scene hail from the Netherlands, including Tiësto, Don Diablo, Armin van Buuren, Ferry Corsten, Sander van Doorn, Fedde le Grand, Hardwell, Showtek, Afrojack, Oliver Heldens, Ran-D, and Martin Garrix, all of whom consistently rank high in the DJ Mag Top 100 DJs and other rankings. The Amsterdam Dance Event is a big electronic music conference and one of the biggest conferences for the many electronic subgenres.

Hip-hop in the Dutch language (nederhop) has exploded since 2000 in the Netherlands and is also popular in Belgium. Songs like "Traag", "Europapa", "Coño", and "Cartier" reached an international audience, and are to date the most streamed Dutch-language songs on Spotify, with around 125 to 150 million total streams per song.

Classical and contemporary classical music

Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (May 1562 – October 16, 1621) was a Dutch composer, organist, and pedagogue whose work straddled the end of the Renaissance and beginning of the Baroque eras. Sweelinck was a master improviser, and acquired the informal title of the "Orpheus of Amsterdam". Over 70 keyboard works of his have survived, and many of them may be similar to the improvisations that residents of Amsterdam around 1600 were likely to have heard. Even his vocal music, which is more conservative than his keyboard writing, shows a striking rhythmic complexity and an unusual richness of contrapuntal devices.

His influence was international. Some of his music appears in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, which otherwise mainly contains the work of English composers. Sweelinck wrote variations on John Dowland's internationally famous Lachrimae Pavane, and John Bull, the English keyboard composer, wrote a set of variations on a theme of Sweelinck, indicating the close connection between the different schools of composition across the North Sea.

Jacob van Eyck (ca. 1590–1657) was a blind recorder and organ virtuoso, who composed a unique collection of flute music.

Unico Wilhelm van Wassenaer (1692–1766) was an accomplished baroque composer, whose work Concerti Armonici erroneously was attributed to Giovanni Battista Pergolesi. Igor Stravinsky used Unico's music for Pulcinella.

Alphons Diepenbrock (September 2, 1862 – April 5, 1921) created a musical idiom which, in a highly personal manner, combined 16th-century polyphony with Wagnerian chromaticism, to which in later years was added the impressionistic refinement that he encountered in Debussy's music.

Willem Pijper (1894–1947) is generally considered one of the most important figures in modern Dutch music. Between 1918 and 1922 he grew into one of the more advanced composers in Europe. In each successive work he went a step further and, from 1919, Pijper's music can be described as atonal. However, Pijper remained a composer of strong emotional character, to which his Third Symphony (1926) bears witness. In Pijper's later works the harmonic expression seems at times to approach monotonality. As a teacher Pijper had a great influence on modern Dutch music, teaching many prominent Dutch composers of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. He was senior master of instrumentation in the Amsterdam Conservatoire, and from 1930 until his death in 1947 he was Head of the Rotterdam Conservatoire.

Ton de Leeuw (born Rotterdam, 16 November 1926 - died Paris, 31 May 1996) is known for his experiments with microtonality. He wrote one opera, Antigone (1990–1991).

Lex van Delden (1919–1988) and Simeon ten Holt (1923–2012) were important composers.

Louis Andriessen (June 6, 1939 – July 1, 2021) was a composer whose early works show experimentation with various contemporary trends: postwar serialism (Series, 1958), pastiche (Anachronie I, 1966–67), and tape (Il Duce, 1973). Andriessen's mature music combines the influences of Stravinsky and American minimalism. His harmonic writing eschews the consonant modality of much minimalism, preferring postwar European dissonance, often crystallised into large blocks of sound. Large-scale pieces such as De Staat ['Republic'] (1972–76), for example, were influenced by the energy of the big band music of Count Basie and Stan Kenton and the repetitive procedures of Steve Reich, both combined with bright, clashing dissonances. Andriessen's music is thus anti-Germanic and anti-Romantic, and marks a departure from postwar European serialism and its offshoots. He also played a role in providing alternatives to traditional performance practice techniques, often specifying forceful, rhythmic articulations, and amplified, non-vibrato, singing. Other notable works include Workers Union (1975), a melodically indeterminate piece "for any loud sounding group of instruments"; Mausoleum (1979) for two baritones and large ensemble; De Tijd ['Time'] (1979–81) for female singers and ensemble; De Snelheid ['Velocity'] (1982–83), for three amplified ensembles; De Materie ['Matter'] (1984–88) a large four part work for voices and ensemble; collaborations with filmmaker and librettist Peter Greenaway on the film M is for Man, Music, Mozart and the operas Rosa: A Horse Drama (1994) and Writing to Vermeer (1998); and the recent La Passione (2000–02) for female voice and ensemble.

Significant composers after Andriessen include Klaas de Vries (born 1944), Jacob Ter Veldhuis, a.k.a. JacobTV (b. 1951), Guus Janssen (b. 1951) and Cornelis de Bondt (b. 1953).

Folk

Dutch folk music, is characterized by simple straightforward bass motives heavily supplemented with fast, often happy, melody. (Click here for an example.) Uncommon among other European folk, in Dutch music the bass line, not the melody, is the musical line that is danced to. This means that though the music itself may sound fast, the dances are usually quite moderate to slow in tempo. The dances themselves are mainly group dances rather than individual or dual dances.Nederlandse jaarfeesten en hun liederen door de eeuwen heen, by M. Kruijswijk. Clogs are often worn during dances; however, Dutch clog dancing is very different from its more modern counterpart. It is virtually impossible to perform highly active dances with Dutch clogs (which are entirely made from wood, not just the sole) and hence the clogs function as additional percussion, by stamping rhythmically.

In the early 19th century, rural Dutch folk began moving to cities like Amsterdam and Rotterdam, bringing with them folk traditions. Many of their songs and dances, however, began to dwindle in popularity. In the early part of the 20th century, however, a number of urban intellectuals travelled to the countrysides to record with local musicians, a process paralleled in other European countries, such as Spain.

In the 1970s, the Netherlands underwent a roots revival, led by artists like Gerard van Maasakkers, Jos Koning, Dommelvolk and RK Veulpoepers BV, Fungus and Wolverlei. Many of the folk songs performed by these musicians was collected by Cobi Schreijer and Ate Doornbosch, the latter of whom broadcast them on his radio program Onder de groene linde (Under the green lime).

It was in about 1974 that the Dutch folk revival peaked, a year marked by the first recording of Fungus and the birth of Wargaren from the band Pitchwheel.

The mainstream popularity of the Dutch roots revival was short-lived, but it continued in Friesland, where a handful of groups, starting with Irolt in the mid-1970s, sang in the West Frisian language. Frisian folk music has survived thus, aided in part by the Aaipop Festival in Nylân and annual festival in Joure. At Joure's festival, established in 1955, participants dress in 19th century-style clothes and perform traditional music and dance like the skotsploech ensembles.

Modern revivalists include the Groningen band Törf, Folkcorn, Pekel and Twee Violen en een Bas, Lirio, Dubius, Mus, Matzko, Wè-nun Henk.

Moluccan-Dutch musicians like Tala Mena Siwa and the Moluccan Moods Orchestra have had some success with pop-based Moluccan music, while kaseko, a style from the former Dutch colony of Suriname, has also seen mainstream popularity, primarily due to musicians like William Souvenir and Carlo Jones.

Jazz

The North Sea Jazz Festival attracts artists from international acclaim.

Misha Mengelberg (June 5, 1935 - March 3, 2017) was a jazz pianist and composer. He was the pianist on Eric Dolphy's last album, Last Date (1964). Also featuring on that record was the drummer Han Bennink, and together with Piet Noordijk they formed a quartet which had a number of different bassists. They played at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1966. In 1967 he co-founded the Instant Composers Pool, an organisation which promoted avant garde Dutch jazz performances and recordings, with Han Bennink and Willem Breuker.

Mengelberg played with a large variety of musicians. He often performed in a duo with compatriot Bennink, and with other musicians including Derek Bailey, Peter Brötzmann, Evan Parker, Anthony Braxton.

Han Bennink (born April 17, 1942) is a jazz drummer, percussionist and multi-instrumentalist. Through the 1960s he drummed with a number of American musicians visiting the Netherlands, including Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins and Eric Dolphy. He subsequently became a central figure in the emerging European free improvisation (or free jazz) scene. From the late 1960s he played in a trio with saxophonist Peter Brötzmann and Belgian pianist Fred Van Hove, which became a duo after Van Hove's departure in 1976. Through much of the 1990s he played in Clusone 3 (also known as the Clusone Trio), a trio with saxophonist and clarinetist Michael Moore and cellist Ernst Reijseger. He has often played duos with Mengelberg and collaborated with him alongside other musicians.

As well as playing with these long-standing groups, Bennink has performed and recorded solo (such as Tempo Comodo (1982)) and played with many free improvisation and free jazz musicians including Derek Bailey, Conny Bauer, Don Cherry and Alexander von Schlippenbach, as well as more conventional jazz musicians.