Not exactly, but they overlap so much that most listeners treat them as one. Synthwave is the general name for new music built from 1980s film, pop and game sounds. Retrowave is mostly a second name for the same thing. Outrun is either a third synonym or a narrower strand of driving-and-sunset music named after Sega's 1986 arcade game Out Run; sources differ on which.[1] What the Frekvenci archive adds is the count: the three words are not used equally, and synthwave dwarfs the other two.
The short answer
- Synthwave is the umbrella word, and by a wide margin the one most often used in tags.
- Retrowave is used as a synonym, and at least one large site builds its branding on it.
- Outrun is the narrowest. It points to the arcade-racer picture: coast road, sunset, sports car.
If you are looking for music, search for synthwave and add the other two words only to narrow the mood. If you are writing about it, pick one and say what you mean by it.
Where each word comes from
Nobody can say who first wrote "synthwave", and the sources we rely on do not name a coiner, so we do not either. The scene that fed it is easier to place. In France in the mid-2000s, a group of friends around Nantes ran a blog called Valerie from 2007, and a German mp3 blog, Discodust, helped carry their records to listeners abroad.[5] None of that was filed under a genre name at the time. The labels came later, from writers and fans.
Wikipedia's synthwave article, which we use only as a map to its references, lists retrowave and futuresynth as other names for the genre. It also says outrun began as a sub-genre and was later stretched to mean 1980s retro style in general.[1] That drift is the heart of the confusion: the same word has been used both narrowly and broadly.
Outrun has the clearest origin. Sega's Out Run came out in September 1986. You drove a Ferrari Testarossa convertible, the road forked towards five different endings, and a car radio let you choose one of three tunes before the start.[2] Kavinsky named his 2013 debut album OutRun after the game.[2] In our data that record, OutRun, is filed as synth-pop, not under the outrun tag. The word followed the picture of the game more than the sound of it; our Outrun music: the racing-game sound of synthwave goes through that story.
Retrowave is the vaguer word: "retro" plus "wave", built like chillwave and dreamwave. It has also become a business name. NewRetroWave describes its site as covering "Synthwave / Retrowave" and runs a record label under the same brand.[4] That tells you how a big outlet talks, not where the word started. Our Retrowave: the name, the sound and where it overlaps synthwave looks at what actually carries the tag.
Nightride FM shows the working view of the people running streams. One channel is labelled "Synthwave / Retrowave / Outrun", while chillsynth, spacesynth, darksynth and horrorsynth each get their own.[3] For a station, the three words are one mood and the darker, softer and spacier branches are something else.
A short timeline
Putting the dated facts in a row shows that the words arrived in a different order from the sounds.
- September 1986: Sega's Out Run reaches arcades.[2]
- 2007: the Valerie blog starts in Nantes; November 2008: College's album Secret Diary follows.[5]
- 2010: the earliest retrowave-tagged release in our archive, Redline.
- 2011: the earliest outrun-tagged release in our archive, Kef.
- 2013: Kavinsky's OutRun album.[2]
- 2018, 2020, 2021: the peak years for retrowave, synthwave and outrun in our counts.
The archive dates are release dates on file, which can be reissue dates, and they say nothing about when the words were first spoken. A record only gets a tag when somebody applies one, often years later.
Side by side: the three tags in numbers
Everything below counts listed releases in the Frekvenci archive, which begins in 2000. The tags are the community's tags from MusicBrainz and Discogs, mapped onto our genre tree. Peak years use full years only; 2026 is a part year.
| Synthwave (whole family) | Retrowave | Outrun | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Listed releases | 8,105 | 429 | 120 |
| Artists | 3,756 | 93 | 31 |
| First year in the archive | 2000 | 2010 | 2011 |
| Peak year | 2020 | 2018 | 2021 |
| Releases in the peak year | 963 | 56 | 13 |
| Self-released | 1,939 | 134 | 33 |
Retrowave makes up 5% of the synthwave family and outrun 1%. The rest is mostly records with no sub-tag at all: 7,435 releases carry plain synthwave. The family also holds spacesynth and a few tiny tags, so the shares do not add up to the whole.
The two sub-tags have different shapes over time:
SHOW THE NUMBERS
| Year | Releases |
|---|---|
| 2010 | 1 |
| 2011 | 0 |
| 2012 | 12 |
| 2013 | 16 |
| 2014 | 23 |
| 2015 | 29 |
| 2016 | 28 |
| 2017 | 36 |
| 2018 | 56 |
| 2019 | 56 |
| 2020 | 48 |
| 2021 | 43 |
| 2022 | 22 |
| 2023 | 21 |
| 2024 | 21 |
| 2025 | 8 |
SHOW THE NUMBERS
| Year | Releases |
|---|---|
| 2011 | 1 |
| 2012 | 4 |
| 2013 | 2 |
| 2014 | 6 |
| 2015 | 3 |
| 2016 | 11 |
| 2017 | 9 |
| 2018 | 7 |
| 2019 | 8 |
| 2020 | 10 |
| 2021 | 13 |
| 2022 | 9 |
| 2023 | 5 |
| 2024 | 9 |
| 2025 | 12 |
Retrowave rose with the scene, reached 56 releases in 2018 and then fell to 22 in 2022 and 8 in 2025, partly because databases are slow to fill in recent years. Outrun never had a boom. It stays between about five and thirteen releases a year, peaks at 13 in 2021, and in 2025 has 12, more than retrowave that year. That fits a small, loyal strand more than a trend.
Here is how the three counts compare in selected full years:
| Year | Synthwave family | Retrowave | Outrun |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | 133 | 12 | 4 |
| 2016 | 639 | 28 | 11 |
| 2020 | 963 | 48 | 10 |
| 2024 | 419 | 21 | 9 |
The ratio shifts: in 2012 retrowave was roughly one release in eleven of the family, in 2024 closer to one in twenty, while outrun sits somewhere between one in thirty and one in a hundred. So the sub-tags did not grow with the scene; the plain word did.
How the tags overlap
The tag pages also show how people double up. Of the 120 outrun releases, 117 also carry the community tag "synthwave", 58 carry "retrowave" and 44 carry "80s". Of the retrowave releases, 421 also carry "synthwave", but only 60 carry the word "retrowave" itself, because our classification partly draws on Discogs style data. No single release sits in all three of our tags at once, since each release is filed under one branch of the tree. Read these numbers as habit, not as proof of what the music is.
Three limits to keep in mind. These counts show how people label records, not how artists describe their own work. The Discogs rows we collected were found by searching for synthwave, so the plain synthwave tag is probably over-represented. And a release counts under its sub-tag when both a sub-tag and the plain tag are present. The conclusion that synthwave dwarfs both is solid; the exact ratios are not.
Who uses which word
The people behind each tag are few and specific.
- Retrowave is led by FiXT Neon, the busiest label for the tag, and Future City Records. The busiest artists are Fury Weekend and Donbor. Country is known for 95% of its releases; among those, the United States leads with 103, then the United Kingdom (60) and France (59).
- Outrun leans on one act. LANDOLSI has 36 of the tag's releases and runs the busiest label for it, LANDOLSI. So the country with the most outrun releases is Tunisia, with 36, ahead of the United States (24). That is one artist's catalogue, not a national scene.
- Synthwave is spread across thousands of artists, with RetroSynth Records and NewRetroWave the two busiest labels. Its busiest artist, Makeup and Vanity Set, has 131 listed releases.
Artists who wear more than one label
Our data files each release under one tag, so the same artist often shows up under several. Perturbator's early record I Am the Night is filed as retrowave, while later ones sit in darker branches. Lazerhawk's Redline, from 2010, is the earliest retrowave-tagged release in the archive; the label that put it out, Rosso Corsa Records, is the one that turns up in all three tags, with at least four releases in each. Robert Parker has releases under both outrun and retrowave. If you want to see how one name can stretch, read If you like Lazerhawk: artists to try next.
The takeaway is that tags follow the record, not the artist. Nobody is an outrun artist for life, and the same album can be tagged differently on different sites.
Which word should you search for?
- Looking for music: synthwave. It matches the most releases, playlists and radio streams.
- Looking for the specific coast-road, sunset feel: add outrun, and expect a small, specific set of artists.
- Looking for bright, song-led synth music: try retrowave and watch which labels dominate.
- Writing about the genre: use "synthwave", and mention the other two as alternative names.
- Searching a radio or streaming app: expect the three words to land on one stream, as they do at Nightride FM, and use the darker or softer station names when you want to leave the main current.
Records to hear the difference
Picked to show each tag at different ages: the first entries, then later records from artists and labels that use it.
- Kavinsky · 2013 · Record Makers · LPThe album that carries the game's name, filed in our data as synth-pop.
- Lazerhawk · 2010 · Rosso Corsa Records · LPThe earliest retrowave-tagged record in the archive, from 2010.
- Perturbator · 2012 · Blood Music · LPA 2012 retrowave-tagged album from before his turn to darker records.
- Robert Parker · 2014 · self-released · SINGLEA 2014 outrun single by the Swedish artist.
- Occams Laser · 2015 · self-released · LPA 2015 self-released outrun album by a British producer.
- Fury Weekend · 2017 · FiXT Neon · EPA retrowave EP on FiXT Neon, from the tag's busiest artist.
Questions people ask
Did Kavinsky's album give outrun its name?
No. The name comes from Sega's 1986 game, and Kavinsky named his 2013 album after the game, not the other way round.[2] The album is a likely reason many people learned the word, though.
Is outrun just a different word for synthwave?
Sources disagree. Some writers use it for all synthwave; Wikipedia describes it as a sub-genre that was later used more loosely.[1] In our archive it behaves like a narrow tag.
Why is outrun so small in the archive if everyone knows the word?
The word is well known, but few releases carry it as a tag. Most artists and labels file their music under synthwave, and one Tunisian artist accounts for about a third of the outrun releases.
Is synthwave the same as vaporwave?
No. They share a love of the 1980s but sound and work very differently. See Synthwave vs vaporwave: same neon, different music, or the wider map in Synthwave sub-genres explained: a map with real counts.
For the history of the scene behind all three words, read A short history of synthwave, from French blogs to the charts. To hear the driving end of all three, tune the Night Drive station (92.0 FM).
Sources
- Synthwave (used as a map to its references) · Wikipedia
- Out Run · Wikipedia
- Nightride FM · Nightride FM, station list read 20 Oct 2026
- NewRetroWave · NewRetroWave, site read 20 Oct 2026
- Valerie Stories: 10 Years of College's Essential LP \"Secret Diary\" · Aaron Vehling, Vehlinggo, 26 Nov 2018