Los Angeles for collaborators.

Kendrick's Pop Out at the Kia Forum reset the temperature, and it hasn't dropped since: West Coast pride is the sound again, G-funk bones under new-generation drums. Top Dawg still works out of Carson, and Paramount Recording on Santa Monica Boulevard runs rap sessions around the clock. From Inglewood to South Central, the city that made gangsta rap a global sound is back at the center of the conversation.

R&B in LA runs on rooms where the studio and the stage share a wall. Gold-Diggers in East Hollywood, a bar up front with recording rooms in back, is where Leon Bridges cut an album and where session vocalists congregate after hours. Across town, the Peppermint Club hosts the label showcases while Soulection's DJ nights keep the left-of-center end of the genre moving.

Pop gets manufactured here in the least romantic sense: writer rooms in Studio City, camps at EastWest on Sunset, A&R meetings at Interscope's Santa Monica offices. The city holds the deepest pool of topliners and track producers anywhere, and the sound shifts with whoever booked Conway that month. When a song hits the Hot 100, some part of it probably happened within ten miles of the 101.

No one confuses LA's country scene with Nashville, but the lineage is real; the Bakersfield sound got its twang two hours north of here. Grand Ole Echo stages free Sunday shows at the Echo from April through October, the Cowboy Palace Saloon in Chatsworth keeps honky-tonk bands on stage five nights a week, and Go Country 105 broadcasts from Westwood.

Northeast LA owns the indie scene now. Zebulon in Frogtown books the adventurous end, Lodge Room in Highland Park gets the bands one album from breaking out, and downtown, the Smell still stages volunteer-run all-ages shows after more than twenty-five years. KXLU's freeform signal remains the scene's tastemaker of record.

LA's electronic scene splits between polish and grit. Insomniac's Factory 93 fills warehouses with techno headliners, HARD Summer takes over Hollywood Park in August, and unlisted parties still surface east of downtown most weekends. Dublab has broadcast the experimental end since 1999, and Catch One, a dance-floor landmark since the seventies, is where every sub-scene eventually converges.

Rock here is two scenes wearing one name. The Troubadour still breaks bands the way it has since the sixties, and Epitaph runs its punk empire from Silver Lake. The raw edge lives in the backyard circuit, though: East LA and Boyle Heights generator shows where hardcore and Chicano punk bands play for door money and word of mouth.

Two poles anchor LA jazz right now. In Leimert Park, the World Stage runs workshops and jam sessions nearly every night, sustaining the community that produced Kamasi Washington and the West Coast Get Down. Near the airport, Sam First books modern and straight-ahead players five nights a week in a room that has become the city's serious listening spot.

Corridos tumbados made LA the capital of regional Mexican music, and Rancho Humilde, the movement's flagship label, runs it from here with a roster that jumped from backyard parties to arenas in five years. Downtown, La Cita keeps cumbia and reggaeton on the floor most nights, and Que Buena 105.5 soundtracks half the trucks on the 710.

Folk's infrastructure here is small rooms with long memories. McCabe's Guitar Shop has hosted back-room concerts in Santa Monica since 1969, the Hotel Café stages songwriters seven nights a week, and Largo at the Coronet handles the genre's prestige bookings. Laurel Canyon is a museum now, but the writing culture it started never left; it just moved indoors.