The objective of this study is to develop a new framework based on Waterwheel Plant optimization for improving minority music genre classification using Layer-tuned Long Short-Term Memory (WP-LT-LSTM). Chinese minority music includes various musical styles of different ethnic groups in China. It depends on the specific instrumentalities, the distribution of pitch classes and rhythms, and the culture. Specifically, the proposed framework will enhance the ability to efficiently detect under represented music genres, which could have applicability for cultural sustainability and more personalized music recommendation services. For this, we collected a dataset that includes a wide range of different minority music samples in audio format. These include genre labels, artist information and audio features necessary for the training of our suggested model. Using K-fold cross validation to enhances the accuracy. Min-max Normalization is used on the obtained data to perform pre-processing. To extract the important features from the processed data, we used Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs). In our proposed model, the WP algorithm dynamically adjusts LT-LSTM’s internal parameters, enhancing model adaptability. LT-LSTM processes sequential audio data, capturing temporal dependencies crucial for genre classification in minority music genres. The implemented model is executed in Python software. It evaluates the model’s performance across a range of parameters throughout the result analysis phase. We also performed comparison studies using standard methods. The results collected indicate the excellence and effectiveness of the proposed framework for music genre identification.