way to assert their individuality. In the instance of trance music, this desire led to "progressive trance", "Goa trance", "deep psytrance", and "hard trance". House, drum-n-bass, dubstep and techno also contain a large number of microgenres. Digital age The concept of microgenres gained prominence during the digital age, and despite its earlier history, is more often associated with later trends. The speed at which microgenres achieve recognition and familiarity also accelerated substantially. This 21st-century "microgenre explosion" was partly a consequence of "software advances, faster internet connections, and the globalized proliferation of music". In 2009, a writer for the New York Times observed that indie rock was then evolving into "an ever-expanding, incomprehensibly cluttered taxonomy of subgenres." By the early 2010s, most microgenres were linked and defined through various outlets on the internet. Examples of these include chillwave, witch house, seapunk, shitgaze, vaporwave, and cloud rap. Each of them, according to Vice writer Ezra Marcus, were "music scenes [created] out of thin air". Pitchforks Jonny Coleman commented: "The line between a real genre that sounds fake and a fake genre that could be real is as thin as ever, if existent at all. This is the uncanny genre valley that publicists-cum-neologicians live in and for." Chillwave—termed sarcastically in a 2009 blog post—was one of the first music genres to formulate online. The term did not gain mainstream currency until early 2010, when it was the subject of articles by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Writing in 2019, journalist Emilie Friedlander, called chillwave "the internet electronic micro-genre that launched a hundred internet electronic micro-genres (think: vaporwave, witch house, seapunk, shitgaze, distroid, hard vapor), not to mention its corollaries in this decade’s internet rap, which largely shared its collagist, hyper-referential approach to sound." Criticism In 2010, The Atlantics Llewellyn Hinkes Johns referenced the succession of chillwave, glo-fi, and hypnagogic pop as a "prime example" of a cycle involving the invention of a new category that is quickly and "brazenly denounced, sometimes in the same article". Grantlands Dave Schilling describes the "chillwave" designation as a pivotal moment that "revealed how arbitrary and meaningless labels like that really are. It wasn't a scene. It was a parody of a scene, both a defining moment for the music blogosphere and the last gasp." PopMatters Thomas Britt argued that the "staggering number of niches created by writers and commenters to 'distinguish' musical acts