"Amor Prohibido" contains a more diverse collection of musical styles than Selena's previous work, ranging from ranchera to hip-hop music. Music critics believe it is an album of various genres accessible to both traditional and contemporary Latin music fans. Musicologist Matt Doeden found the album as having "a new sound" whose aim was to appeal to a broad audience. Perone found the mixture of compositions on the album to be rock and dance music, and according to Frank Hoffman in the "Encyclopedia of Recorded Sound", the album exhibited the band's broad range of styles. "Newsweek" found the music in "Amor Prohibido" to have combined house music, cumbia, rock, dancehall, and new wave that was modernized in a kaleidoscopic form that embodied postmodern maelstrom of the mid-'90s. "Amor Prohibido" diverged from Selena's "stock-in-trade contemporary Tex-Mex sound." Mario Tarradell of "The Dallas Morning News", however, believed the title track and "Bidi Bidi Bom Bom" contained Selena's cheerful and enthusiastic personality that were prevalent in previous recordings. The album's musical influences include salsa, funk, R&B, bubblegum pop, teen pop, pop ballads, techno, a fusion of reggae and dancehall, rock, polka, conjunto, flamenco, mariachi, corridos, and Tejano cumbia. Tejano cumbia is used heavily throughout "Amor Prohibido". Author Ed Morales noticed its representation of the "cumbia sound" already established by Tejano band La Mafia, though Donald Clarke found Selena's delivery to be more of a modernized synthesizer-rich sound. While "Amor Prohibido" is a cross-cultural musical fusion, it remains an authentic Tejano recording, which uses a minimalist style that was quintessential in early 1990s Tejano music.