Synthwave is new music made in the style of 1980s film scores, synth-pop and arcade games: original songs, drums that sound played, a melody you can hum. Vaporwave is a different craft. It is built mostly from existing recordings (muzak, 1980s and 1990s pop, lounge music) that are slowed down, looped and soaked in echo.[2] The two share neon, grids and nostalgia, which is why people mix them up, but one composes the past and the other samples it.
Because the Frekvenci archive tags both, we can do what most comparisons cannot and count. It lists 10,473 vaporwave releases against 8,105 for synthwave. Vaporwave is now the larger of the two, and that was not always so.
The short answer
Three questions sort almost any record.
- Where do the sounds come from? Synthwave producers play or program their own synths and drums. Vaporwave producers chop, slow and loop existing recordings, although some now add original parts.
- What is the mood? Synthwave tends to be fast, driven and cinematic, with the melody out front. Vaporwave is slower, hazier and often deliberately uncomfortable or ironic.
- What is the point? Synthwave wants you to feel as if you are inside an 1980s film. A peer-reviewed study calls vaporwave a "memory play", a genre whose pleasure lies in remembering for its own sake.[4]
If a record sounds like a car chase, it is almost certainly synthwave. If it sounds like a shopping-centre PA system heard underwater, it is almost certainly vaporwave.
The two genres in one table
| Synthwave | Vaporwave | |
|---|---|---|
| Method | Composed and played on real or emulated synths | Sampled, slowed, looped and effected; some now new-composed |
| Early landmarks | College's Secret Diary, 26 Nov 2008 | Eccojams Vol. 1, Aug 2010; Floral Shoppe, Dec 2011 |
| Typical mood | Driving, cinematic, romantic or dark | Hazy, ironic, sleepy, sometimes unsettling |
| Typical release | Single, then album | Long album or EP, often a tape-style drop |
| Listed releases | 8,105 | 10,473 |
| Artists | 3,756 | 3,182 |
| Labels | 2,077 | 558 |
| Self-released | 1,939 | 1,786 |
| Busiest full year | 2020 (963) | 2025 (1,110) |
The last five rows come straight from our catalogue data. Counts cover listed releases only, and the archive starts in 2000.
How each one is made
A synthwave track is composed in the ordinary sense. The producer writes drum patterns, a bass line, arpeggios, pads and a lead on real or emulated synthesizers, then mixes them to sound like an 1980s studio. We walk through that chain in How synthwave is made: the sounds, the gear, the tricks.
A vaporwave track begins with someone else's recording. Bandcamp Daily's family tree describes the core method as looping and slowing old songs under heavy echo, a template it traces to Daniel Lopatin's 2010 Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1.[2] Over the years the method split. Some producers abandoned samples altogether: in his 2013 survey, Adam Harper argued that vaporwave made from scratch, which he called "new-composed", deserved recognition of its own.[8] Others kept sampling but changed the target. Future Funk speeds old disco up for the dance floor, Mallsoft imagines an empty shopping centre, and Vaportrap puts trap drums under the haze. Bandcamp's list names ten such branches, from eccojams to hardvapour.[2]
Where each came from
Synthwave took shape in the mid-to-late 2000s in France and Western Europe, and College and Kavinsky are among the early names.[1] College says his Valerie blog began in Nantes in April 2007 and that Secret Diary came out on 26 November 2008.[5] The music's ancestors, according to a 2023 academic article on synthwave soundtracks, are the film scores of the 1970s and 1980s.[6] Our full timeline is in A short history of synthwave, from French blogs to the charts.
Vaporwave surfaced a little later, in internet music circles. Bandcamp Daily dates Eccojams Vol. 1 to 2010, James Ferraro's Far Side Virtual to 2011 and Blank Banshee's debut to 2012.[2] Wikipedia gives the eccojams tape an August 2010 release, and says Macintosh Plus's Floral Shoppe appeared in December 2011 and became the genre's representative record after a widely watched review in November 2012.[7] Tiny Mix Tapes confirms the December 2011 cassette on Beer On The Rug and its #6 place on the site's 2012 year-end list, and adds that many artists later called vaporwave had not yet adopted the word in 2012.[3] Sources also disagree on who first used the word, so the safe wording is that vaporwave took shape between 2010 and 2011.[7]
Vaporwave has a second parent that synthwave lacks: chillwave. Wikipedia says chillwave and hypnagogic pop were both named around mid-2009, and that vaporwave began as an ironic variant of chillwave.[7] Our Chillwave explained: the hazy 2009 sound and what followed tells that part. The tags back the link up: 624 releases carry the chillwave tag, and 1,121 vaporwave-family releases do too.
Notice the order. Secret Diary is from 2008, the first eccojams tape from 2010, and both scenes then grew online. Neither has a clean first record.
The numbers side by side
SHOW THE NUMBERS
| Year | Releases |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 33 |
| 2010 | 47 |
| 2011 | 46 |
| 2012 | 133 |
| 2013 | 191 |
| 2014 | 318 |
| 2015 | 441 |
| 2016 | 639 |
| 2017 | 819 |
| 2018 | 895 |
| 2019 | 842 |
| 2020 | 963 |
| 2021 | 763 |
| 2022 | 581 |
| 2023 | 472 |
| 2024 | 419 |
| 2025 | 267 |
SHOW THE NUMBERS
| Year | Releases |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 2 |
| 2010 | 5 |
| 2011 | 21 |
| 2012 | 32 |
| 2013 | 135 |
| 2014 | 241 |
| 2015 | 614 |
| 2016 | 796 |
| 2017 | 672 |
| 2018 | 995 |
| 2019 | 842 |
| 2020 | 1,007 |
| 2021 | 914 |
| 2022 | 796 |
| 2023 | 933 |
| 2024 | 1,001 |
| 2025 | 1,110 |
| Year | Synthwave | Vaporwave |
|---|---|---|
| 2011 | 46 | 21 |
| 2013 | 191 | 135 |
| 2015 | 441 | 614 |
| 2017 | 819 | 672 |
| 2019 | 842 | 842 |
| 2021 | 763 | 914 |
| 2023 | 472 | 933 |
| 2025 | 267 | 1,110 |
Reading the curves:
- Synthwave led early. In 2011 it had more than twice as many releases as vaporwave (46 against 21).
- Vaporwave then jumped. From 32 in 2012 it went to 135 in 2013 and 614 in 2015, ahead of synthwave in 2015 and 2016. Synthwave regained the lead in 2017, vaporwave retook it in 2018, the two tied in 2019, and vaporwave has led every year since.
- The curves split after 2020. Synthwave's yearly count has fallen since its peak, while vaporwave's busiest full year is the latest one, 2025. Recent years are the ones databases fill in last, so treat the size of the recent gap as provisional. 2026 is a part year and tells us nothing yet.
Release habits differ as much as the curves. Vaporwave's busiest label, DMT Tapes FL, accounts for 1,189 listed releases, roughly one in nine. Synthwave's busiest, RetroSynth Records, has 152, about one in fifty. Vaporwave sits on only 558 labels against 2,077 for synthwave, so it is the bigger catalogue and the far more concentrated one.
Self-release runs the other way. About one in four synthwave records is self-released (1,939), against about one in six vaporwave records (1,786). Country is on file for only part of each catalogue, but among releases with a known country the United States leads both (3,221 vaporwave, 1,493 synthwave). Below the US the lists differ: France and Sweden are in synthwave's top five countries, while Japan, Russia and Brazil are in vaporwave's top ten.
What you are actually getting: formats
The shape of a release differs too. Vaporwave is dominated by long-form releases, while synthwave has a more even mix of singles and albums. These are the formats listed in the archive:
| Type | Vaporwave | Synthwave |
|---|---|---|
| Albums (LP) | 6,428 | 3,024 |
| EPs | 2,264 | 1,682 |
| Singles | 919 | 2,333 |
| Compilations | 230 | 288 |
| Mixes | 102 | 13 |
Albums and EPs make up about five in six vaporwave releases, while singles are nearly three in ten synthwave releases. That fits how each travelled: vaporwave spread through tape-style labels and Bandcamp albums, and much of synthwave follows the pop habit of a single first and an album after.
Branches: moods versus methods
Synthwave's branches are mostly moods of one sound. Vaporwave's are closer to separate genres. In the archive the Vaporwave family splits into ten sub-tags beside the plain one. The biggest are Barber Beats (1,881), Future Funk (1,538) and Signalwave (1,505), followed by Slushwave, Dreampunk, Mallsoft, Vaportrap, Eccojams, Utopian Virtual and Hardvapour. Synthwave's family is smaller and lopsided: Retrowave, Outrun and Spacesynth together make a modest slice beside the main tag.
The vaporwave names describe a method or a source (eccojams, mallsoft, signalwave), which is why the list can feel foreign to a synthwave listener. The map is in What is vaporwave? A guide to the internet's slowed-down mall music, and each branch has a guide: What are eccojams? The looped, slowed edits that started vaporwave, What is utopian virtual? Vaporwave's bright, corporate-future side, What is mallsoft? The sound of an empty shopping mall, What is vaportrap? When vaporwave met trap drums, What is signalwave? Vaporwave made from old TV and radio broadcasts, What is hardvapour? Vaporwave's loud, fast backlash, What is slushwave? Vaporwave stretched into ambient, What is dreampunk? Vaporwave's dark, cinematic dream, What is barber beats? The vaporwave micro-genre named after one prolific artist and Future funk: vaporwave's dance floor, explained. On the synthwave side, read Synthwave sub-genres explained: a map with real counts, Retrowave: the name, the sound and where it overlaps synthwave and Outrun music: the racing-game sound of synthwave.
Where the two overlap
Our data assigns each release to one family, so nothing is counted in both. User tags still cross over. Among the listed synthwave releases, 269 carry a "vaporwave" tag; among the vaporwave ones, 365 carry "synthwave". The bridge in the tag data is chillwave: of its 624 tagged releases, 239 also have the synthwave tag and 234 the vaporwave tag.
A handful of labels release both kinds. business casual has at least 16 listed releases in each family, followed by Record Club and VILL4IN; the first has its own profile in business casual: label profile and where to start. Neither scene has a clean boundary, and where a record sits depends on its taggers.
Which one are you looking for?
- A score for a night drive, a workout or a video game: synthwave. Start with the Night Drive station (92.0 FM).
- Something strange, slow and sleepy for late hours: vaporwave, or its softer relatives on the Dreams station (88.1 FM).
- Dance music built on vaporwave's sampling: Future funk: vaporwave's dance floor, explained.
- Not sure: take one record from each side below.
Picks from the archive, chosen to cover both scenes and a bridge between them:
- Kavinsky · 2010 · Record Makers · EPA slow beat, a vocoder voice and a night drive: the cinematic end of synthwave.
- Perturbator · 2014 · Blood Music · LPDark, loud synthwave from an artist who writes everything on synths.
- Timecop1983 · 2015 · TimeSlaves · LPSoft, romantic synthwave for the other end of the night.
- Macintosh Plus · 2011 · Beer on the Rug · LPThe record most people mean when they say vaporwave.
- Chuck Person · 2010 · The Curatorial Club · LPThe 2010 eccojams tape, where the echo-and-loop craft is easiest to hear.
- Blank Banshee · 2012 · Hologram Bay · LPBandcamp Daily's example of vaporwave with trap drums, from 2012.
- Com Truise · 2011 · Ghostly International · EPA 2011 EP tagged chillwave, the label that sits between the two camps in the tag data.
Common mix-ups, answered
Is vaporwave older than synthwave?
Not by the dates sources give. College's Valerie blog started in 2007 and Secret Diary came out in 2008, while the first eccojams tape is from 2010.[5][2] Neither scene has an agreed first record, though, and the archive's own curves show synthwave ahead until 2014.
Is retrowave the same as synthwave?
Largely yes. Wikipedia treats synthwave, retrowave and futuresynth as names for one microgenre, and the Frekvenci archive keeps retrowave as a sub-tag of synthwave, not of vaporwave.[1] Details are in Retrowave: the name, the sound and where it overlaps synthwave.
Can one record be both?
In listeners' tags, yes. Hundreds of releases carry both words, and chillwave is the tag that most often does the bridging. In our data each release sits in one family only.
Where do I go next?
For the broader synthwave picture, read What is synthwave? A plain guide, with the numbers. For vaporwave from the inside, read What is vaporwave? A guide to the internet's slowed-down mall music, or start from one artist with If you like Macintosh Plus: artists to try next.
Sources
- Synthwave (used as a map to its references) · Wikipedia
- Genre As Method: The Vaporwave Family Tree, From Eccojams to Hardvapour · Bandcamp Daily, 21 Nov 2016
- Macintosh Plus's Floral Shoppe is coming to vinyl · Tiny Mix Tapes, 7 Aug 2017
- Vaporwave, or music optimised for abandoned malls · Laura Glitsos, Popular Music 37(1), 2018
- Valerie Stories: 10 Years of College's Essential LP 'Secret Diary' · Vehlinggo, 26 Nov 2018
- More 1980s than the 1980s: Hauntological and Hyperreal Meanings of Synthwave Soundtracks · Mattia Merlini, Sound Stage Screen 3(1), 2023
- Vaporwave (used as a map to its references) · Wikipedia
- Pattern Recognition Vol. 8.5: The Year in Vaporwave · Adam Harper, Electronic Beats, 5 Dec 2013