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 conquered the world. Most of the best-known DJs in the EDM scene (and the world) 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 (ADE) is the world's leading electronic music conference and the biggest club festival for the many electronic subgenres on the planet. These artists also contribute significantly to the mainstream pop music played over the airwaves all around the world, as they frequently collaborate and produce for many notable artists.

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.

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.