so is vaporwave considered strictly musical by the content creators, as opposed to the more audiovisual aspect that most people seem to view it as?
This is sort of a weird question to answer, since it depends on producer to producer. But I like to think of vaporwave as having a strong audiovisual component. I personally think we need to define some characteristics for a musical definition though. I find it a bit odd that we mostly define a musical genre with a non-musical definition. And it's not for the purpose of setting a clear line between vaporwave and not-vaporwave, it's more for having a starting point for all of us to work off of. The visual component is more Glitch art and photoshopped surrealism compared to just "wow look at my sweet keyboard" on r/vaporwave.