Pink Floyd’s song “Money,” from The Dark Side of The Moon, could be considered multiple genres, but progressive rock seems to be the most fitting. Numerous critics in the music industry contemplate and change their minds on what genre this significant and important album is considered to be in. However through a plethora of research, “Money” ostensibly fits into the progressive rock genre. Progressive Rock elements are rooted in Pink Floyd’s music and album. When an album is considered to be in the progressive rock category, it usually contains songs with an increased length, blues based instrumentals, and lyric lines that created a psychedelic experience. In John Palmer’s article on the “Progressive Rock Style,” he said that “Pink Floyd is probably the best known example of a band that translated the timelessness of the LSD experience into music, using repetition, minimal harmonic movement and slow tempos to avoid a sense of completion”(Palmer 245).

The song “Money” has a very slow tempo, throughout the entire song the sound of coins going into a slot machine is on repeat. The meter is 7/4 rather than the normal 4/4 meter used in rock which makes the song seem incomplete. Although it seems like this would never work, “a general economic prosperity in the late 1960s and early 1970s and particularly the economic prosperity of the recorded music industry, made it possible to allow performers to record experimental music”(Palmer 243). The most experimental aspect of Pink Floyd’s “Money” is the instrumentation. Palmer explains “the importance, and often primacy, of instrumentation is one of the defining characteristics of progressive rock”(Palmer 245). Even though The Dark Side of The Moon does not have any lengthy songs like most progressive rock songs, Pink Floyd has a twenty five minute song called: “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” and a seventeen minute song called “Dogs.” 

The genre of progressive rock has many different types of songs. A few years after “Money,” the song “Awaken” by Yes was released and has a length of fifteen minutes but is still considered prog-rock. “Awaken” introduces a church based instrumental rather than Pink Floyd’s blues based. Despite the large difference between these two songs and artists, they are both in the same genre because of their minimal harmonic movement, psychedelic experience, and experimental style.