The music of Crete (Greek: Κρητική μουσική, Kritikí mousikí), also called kritika (κρητικά), refers to traditional forms of Greek folk music prevalent on the island of Crete in Greece. Cretan traditional music includes instrumental music (generally also involving singing), a capella songs known as the rizitika, "Erotokritos," Cretan urban songs (tabachaniotika), as well as other miscellaneous songs and folk genres (lullabies, ritual laments, etc.).

Historically, there have been significant variations in the music across the island (more violin than lyra in far Eastern and Western Crete, a preference for the syrtos in Western Crete and kondylies in Eastern Crete). Some of this variation continues today and in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries has received greater attention by scholars and the mass media. Nonetheless, over the course of the twentieth-century, the sense of a single, island-wide Cretan musical tradition emerged.

Although much Cretan music remains consciously close to its folk roots and an integral part of the fabric of many Cretans' everyday lives, it is also a vibrant and evolving modern, popular tradition that involves many professional and semi-professional musicians, numerous regional record companies and professional distributors, professional luthiers (especially of Cretan lyras and Cretan lutes), and Cretan kentra (clubs for dancing to live Cretan music).

Much Cretan music includes the use of instruments (and usually singing, too). Lyra, violin, and laouto (Cretan lute) predominate, but other common instruments include the mandolin, mandola, oud, thiampoli (souravli), askomandoura, classical guitar (especially in Eastern Crete), boulgari, and daouli (davul). There is also an instrument known as the viololyra, a hybrid of the violin and lyra, which has enjoyed varying degrees of popularity at various times.

Cretan music has been largely heterophonic in texture or accompanied by drones and fifth chords on Cretan lute, classical guitar, mandolin, boulgari, and so forth. Drones are also played simultaneously on melody instruments such as the lyra and violin by bowing a second string (usually open) simultaneously as one plays the melody notes on another string. Especially in earlier and more amateur settings where a second accompanying instrument was often absent, a lyra player accompanied himself by playing not only a drone string but also with a distinctively rhythmic bowing style in order to ring the gerakokoudhouna (small "falcon bells") that were attached to his bow. It is much more common today for the lyra to be accompanied by one or more other instruments, and for lyra players to employ a violin bow.

Like much Greek folk music, Cretan music is closely related to dance, and the most common musical forms correspond directly with the Cretan dances that may accompany them, such as the Syrtos, pentozali, siganos, pidikhtos, and Sousta. Certain traditional dances from other regions of Greece, most notably kalamatianos and ballos, are also widely performed by professional Cretan musicians, usually with Cretan-composed lyrics, in musical gatherings since at least the twentieth century. Like fiddle tunes in various other traditions, Cretan dance music often involves repeated melodies or repeated pairings of melodies, whose selection and concatenation is improvised in performance.

Another musical construction common to Cretan music is the taximi (Greek: ταξίμι), a rhythmically free, improvised instrumental solo (e.g., on the violin, lyra, or lute) in a particular scale or mode preceding the dance-song proper. (Both the word taximi and the musical form itself are cognates with the Arabic taqsim.)

Much Cretan music is improvisational, especially in terms of its "lyrics." Typically, the lyrics of Cretan instrumental music take the form of mantinadas (Greek: μαντινάδα): fifteen-syllable rhyming (or assonant) couplets which have their origins in medieval Cretan poetry (as rhyming couplets) as well as in earlier (non-rhyming) forms of Greek verse (in the same fifteen-syllable form).