Pop music is a genre of popular music that originated in its modern form during the mid-1950s in the United States and the United Kingdom. The terms ''popular music'' and ''pop music'' are often used interchangeably, although the former describes all music that is popular and includes many disparate styles. During the 1950s and 1960s, pop music encompassed rock and roll and the youth-oriented styles it influenced. '' Rock'' and ''pop'' music remained roughly synonymous until the late 1960s, after which ''pop'' became associated with music that was more commercial, ephemeral, and accessible. Although much of the music that appears on record charts is considered to be pop music, the genre is distinguished from chart music. Identifying factors usually include repeated choruses and hooks, short to medium-length songs written in a basic format (often the verse-chorus structure), and rhythms or tempos that can be easily danced to. Much pop music also borrows elements from other styles such as rock, urban,

dance Dance is a performing art form consisting of sequences of movement, either improvised or purposefully selected. This movement has aesthetic and often symbolic value. Dance can be categorized and described by its choreography, by its repertoir ...

, Latin, and country.

Definitions and etymology

David Hatch and Stephen Millward describe pop music as "a body of music which is distinguishable from popular, jazz, and folk music". According to Pete Seeger, pop music is "professional music which draws upon both folk music and fine arts music". David Boyle, a music researcher, states pop music as any type of music that a person has been exposed to by the mass media. Most individuals think that pop music is just the singles charts and not the sum of all chart music. The music charts contain songs from a variety of sources, including classical, jazz, rock, and novelty songs. As a genre, pop music is seen to exist and develop separately. Therefore, the term "pop music" may be used to describe a distinct genre, designed to appeal to all, often characterized as "instant singles-based music aimed at teenagers" in contrast to rock music as "album-based music for adults". Pop music continuously evolves along with the term's definition. According to music writer Bill Lamb, popular music is defined as "the music since industrialization in the 1800s that is most in line with the tastes and interests of the urban middle class." The term "pop song" was first used in 1926, in the sense of a piece of music "having popular appeal".J. Simpson and E. Weiner, ''Oxford English Dictionary''(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). , cf. pop. Hatch and Millward indicate that many events in the history of recording in the 1920s can be seen as the birth of the modern pop music industry, including in country,

blues Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the Afr ...

, and hillbilly music. Rolling stones - 11 luglio 2006 - san siro

According to the website of '' The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians'', the term "pop music" "originated in Britain in the mid-1950s as a description for rock and roll and the new youth music styles that it influenced", this is however unsubstantiated.R. Middleton, et al.
"Pop"
''Grove music online'', retrieved 14 March 2010. ''The Oxford Dictionary of Music'' states that while pop's "earlier meaning meant concerts appealing to a wide audience ..since the late 1950s, however, pop has had the special meaning of non-classical mus c usually in the form of songs, performed by such artists as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, ABBA, etc." ''Grove Music Online'' also states that " ..in the early 1960s, he term'pop music' competed terminologically with beat music n England while in the US its coverage overlapped (as it still does) with that of 'rock and roll'". From about 1967, the term "pop music" was increasingly used in opposition to the term rock music, a division that gave generic significance to both terms.Kenneth Gloag in ''The Oxford Companion to Music'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), , p. 983. While rock aspired to authenticity and an expansion of the possibilities of popular music, pop was more commercial, ephemeral, and accessible.T. Warner, ''Pop Music: Technology and Creativity: Trevor Horn and the Digital Revolution'' (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), , pp. 3–4. According to British musicologist Simon Frith, pop music is produced "as a matter of enterprise not art", and is "designed to appeal to everyone" but "doesn't come from any particular place or mark off any particular taste". Frith adds that it is "not driven by any significant ambition except profit and commercial reward ..and, in musical terms, it is essentially conservative". It is, "provided from on high (by record companies, radio programmers, and concert promoters) rather than being made from below ... Pop is not a

do-it-yourself "Do it yourself" ("DIY") is the method of building, modifying, or repairing things by oneself without the direct aid of professionals or certified experts. Academic research has described DIY as behaviors where "individuals use raw and semi ...

music but is professionally produced and packaged".

Characteristics

According to Frith, characteristics of pop music include an aim of appealing to a general audience, rather than to a particular sub-culture or ideology, and an emphasis on craftsmanship rather than formal "artistic" qualities. Besides, Frith also offers three identifying characteristics of pop music: light entertainment, commercial imperatives, and personal identification. Pop music grew out of a light entertainment/ easy listening tradition. Pop music is more conservative than other music genres such as folk, blues, country, and tradition. Many pop songs do not contain themes of resistance, opposition, or political themes, rather focusing more on love and relationships. Therefore, pop music does not challenge its audiences socially, and does not cause political activism. Frith also said the main purpose of pop music is to create revenue. It is not a medium of free articulation of the people. Instead, pop music seeks to supply the nature of personal desire and achieve the instant empathy with cliche personalities, stereotypes, and melodrama that appeals to listeners. It is mostly about how much revenue pop music makes for record companies. Music scholar Timothy Warner said pop music typically has an emphasis on recording, production, and technology, rather than live performance; a tendency to reflect existing trends rather than progressive developments; and seeks to encourage dancing or uses dance-oriented rhythms. The main medium of pop music is the song, often between two and a half and three and a half minutes in length, generally marked by a consistent and noticeable rhythmic element, a mainstream style and a simple traditional

structure A structure is an arrangement and organization of interrelated elements in a material object or system, or the object or system so organized. Material structures include man-made objects such as buildings and machines and natural objects such as ...

. The structure of many popular songs is that of a verse and a chorus, the chorus serving as the portion of the track that is designed to stick in the ear through simple repetition both musically and lyrically. The chorus is often where the music builds towards and is often preceded by "the drop" where the bass and drum parts "drop out". Common variants include the verse-chorus form and the thirty-two-bar form, with a focus on melodies and catchy hooks, and a chorus that contrasts melodically, rhythmically and harmonically with the

verse Verse may refer to: Poetry * Verse, an occasional synonym for poetry * Verse, a metrical structure, a stanza * Blank verse, a type of poetry having regular meter but no rhyme * Free verse, a type of poetry written without the use of strict me ...

. The beat and the melodies tend to be simple, with limited harmonic accompaniment. The lyrics of modern pop songs typically focus on simple themes – often love and romantic relationships – although there are notable exceptions.

Harmony In music, harmony is the process by which individual sounds are joined together or composed into whole units or compositions. Often, the term harmony refers to simultaneously occurring frequencies, pitches ( tones, notes), or chords. However ...

and chord progressions in pop music are often "that of classical European tonality, only more simple-minded." Clichés include the barbershop quartet-style harmony (i.e. ii – V – I) and blues scale-influenced harmony. There was a lessening of the influence of traditional views of the circle of fifths between the mid-1950s and the late 1970s, including less predominance for the dominant function.

Development and influence

Technology and media

In the 1940s, improved microphone design allowed a more intimate singing style and, ten or twenty years later, inexpensive and more durable 45 rpm records for singles "revolutionized the manner in which pop has been disseminated", which helped to move pop music to "a record/radio/film star system".D. Buckley, "Pop" "II. Implications of technology", ''Grove Music Online'', retrieved 15 March 2010. Another technological change was the widespread availability of television in the 1950s with televised performances, forcing "pop stars had to have a visual presence". In the 1960s, the introduction of inexpensive, portable transistor radios meant that teenagers in the developed world could listen to music outside of the home. By the early 1980s, the promotion of pop music had been greatly affected by the rise of music television channels like

MTV MTV (Originally an initialism of Music Television) is an American cable channel that launched on August 1, 1981. Based in New York City, it serves as the flagship property of the MTV Entertainment Group, part of Paramount Media Networks, a di ...

, which "favoured those artists such as Michael Jackson and

Madonna Madonna Louise Ciccone (; ; born August 16, 1958) is an American singer-songwriter and actress. Widely dubbed the " Queen of Pop", Madonna has been noted for her continual reinvention and versatility in music production, songwriting, a ...

who had a strong visual appeal". Multi-track recording (from the 1960s) and digital sampling (from the 1980s) have also been used as methods for the creation and elaboration of pop music. During the mid-1960s, pop music made repeated forays into new sounds, styles, and techniques that inspired public discourse among its listeners. The word "progressive" was frequently used, and it was thought that every song and single was to be a "progression" from the last.

Music critic ''The Oxford Companion to Music'' defines music criticism as "the intellectual activity of formulating judgments on the value and degree of excellence of individual works of music, or whole groups or genres". In this sense, it is a branch of mus ...

Simon Reynolds Simon Reynolds (born 19 June 1963) is an English music journalist and author who began his professional career on the staff of ''Melody Maker'' in the mid-1980s. He has since gone on to freelance and publish a number of full-length books on music ...

writes that beginning with 1967, a divide would exist between "progressive" pop and "mass/chart" pop, a separation which was "also, broadly, one between boys and girls, middle-class and working-class." The latter half of the 20th-century included a large-scale trend in American culture in which the boundaries between art and pop music were increasingly blurred. Between 1950 and 1970, there was a debate of pop versus art. Since then, certain music publications have embraced the music's legitimacy, a trend referred to as "

poptimism Rockism and poptimism are two ideological arguments about popular music prevalent in mainstream music journalism. Rockism is the belief that rock music is dependent on values such as authenticity and artfulness, and that such values elevate t ...

Stylistic evolution

Throughout its development, pop music has absorbed influences from other genres of popular music. Early pop music drew on the sentimental ballad for its form, gained its use of vocal harmonies from gospel and soul music, instrumentation from jazz and rock music, orchestration from

classical music Classical music generally refers to the art music of the Western world, considered to be distinct from Western folk music or popular music traditions. It is sometimes distinguished as Western classical music, as the term "classical music" also ...

, tempo from dance music, backing from electronic music, rhythmic elements from hip-hop music, and spoken passages from rap.S. Frith, W. Straw, and J. Street, eds, '' The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), , pp. 95–105. In 2016, a ''

Scientific Reports ''Scientific Reports'' is a peer-reviewed open-access scientific mega journal published by Nature Portfolio, covering all areas of the natural sciences. The journal was established in 2011. The journal states that their aim is to assess solely th ...

'' study that examined over 464,000 recordings of popular music recorded between 1955 and 2010 found that, compared to 1960s pop music, contemporary pop music uses a smaller variety of pitch progressions, greater average volume, less diverse instrumentation and recording techniques, and less timbral variety. '' Scientific American''s John Matson reported that this "seems to support the popular anecdotal observation that pop music of yore was "better", or at least more varied, than today's top-40 stuff". However, he also noted that the study may not have been entirely representative of pop in each generation.John Matson, "Is Pop Music Evolving, or Is It Just Getting Louder?", ''Scientific American'', 26 July 2012
. Retrieved 30 March 2016 In the 1960s, the majority of mainstream pop music fell in two categories: guitar, drum and bass groups or singers backed by a traditional orchestra. Since early in the decade, it was common for pop producers, songwriters, and engineers to freely experiment with musical form,

orchestration Orchestration is the study or practice of writing music for an orchestra (or, more loosely, for any musical ensemble, such as a concert band) or of adapting music composed for another medium for an orchestra. Also called "instrumentation", orc ...

, unnatural reverb, and other sound effects. Some of the best known examples are Phil Spector's Wall of Sound and Joe Meek's use of homemade electronic sound effects for acts like the Tornados. At the same time, pop music on radio and in both American and British film moved away from refined Tin Pan Alley to more eccentric songwriting and incorporated reverb-drenched rock guitar, symphonic strings, and horns played by groups of properly arranged and rehearsed studio musicians. A 2019 study held by New York University in which 643 participants had to rank how familiar a pop song is to them, songs from the 1960s turned out to be the most memorable, significantly more than songs from recent years 2000 to 2015. Before the progressive pop of the late 1960s, performers were typically unable to decide on the artistic content of their music. Assisted by the mid-1960s economic boom, record labels began investing in artists, giving them the freedom to experiment, and offering them limited control over their content and marketing. This situation declined after the late 1970s and would not reemerge until the rise of Internet stars. Indie pop, which developed in the late 1970s, marked another departure from the glamour of contemporary pop music, with guitar bands formed on the then-novel premise that one could record and release their own music without having to procure a record contract from a major label. The 1980s are commonly remembered for an increase in the use of digital recording, associated with the usage of

synthesizer A synthesizer (also spelled synthesiser) is an electronic musical instrument that generates audio signals. Synthesizers typically create sounds by generating waveforms through methods including subtractive synthesis, additive synthesis and ...

s, with

synth-pop Synth-pop (short for synthesizer pop; also called techno-pop; ) is a subgenre of new wave music that first became prominent in the late 1970s and features the synthesizer as the dominant musical instrument. It was prefigured in the 1960s ...

music and other electronic genres featuring non-traditional instruments increasing in popularity. By 2014, pop music worldwide had been permeated by electronic dance music. In 2018, researchers at the University of California, Irvine, concluded that pop music has become 'sadder' since the 1980s. The elements of happiness and brightness have eventually been replaced with electronic beats making pop music more 'sad yet danceable'.

International spread and crosspollination

Pop music has been dominated by the American and (from the mid-1960s) British music industries, whose influence has made pop music something of an international monoculture, but most regions and countries have their own form of pop music, sometimes producing local versions of wider trends, and lending them local characteristics. Some of these trends (for example Europop) have had a significant impact on the development of the genre."Star profiles" in S. Frith, W. Stray and J. Street, ''The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock'' (Cambridge University Press, 2001), , pp. 199–200. According to ''Grove Music Online'', "Western-derived pop styles, whether coexisting with or marginalizing distinctively local genres, have spread throughout the world and have come to constitute stylistic common denominators in global commercial music cultures".P. Manuel, "Pop. Non-Western cultures 1. Global dissemination", ''Grove Music Online'', retrieved 14 March 2010. Some non-Western countries, such as Japan, have developed a thriving pop music industry, most of which is devoted to Western-style pop. Japan has for several years produced a greater quantity of music than everywhere except the US. The spread of Western-style pop music has been interpreted variously as representing processes of Americanization,

homogenization Homogeneity is a sameness of constituent structure. Homogeneity, homogeneous, or homogenization may also refer to: In mathematics * Transcendental law of homogeneity of Leibniz * Homogeneous space for a Lie group G, or more general transformat ...

, modernization, creative appropriation, cultural imperialism, or a more general process of globalization. One of the pop music styles that developed alongside other music styles is

Latin pop Latin pop (in Spanish and in Portuguese: Pop latino) is a pop music subgenre that is a fusion of US–style music production with Latin music genres from anywhere in Latin America and Spain. Originating in Spanish-speaking musicians, Latin po ...

, which rose in popularity in the US during the 1950s with early rock and roll success Ritchie Valens. Later, as

Los Lobos Los Lobos (, Spanish for "the Wolves") are an American rock band from East Los Angeles, California. Their music is influenced by rock and roll, Tex-Mex, country, zydeco, folk, R&B, blues, brown-eyed soul, and traditional music such as cumbia, ...

garnered major Chicano rock popularity during the 1970s and 1980s, musician Selena saw large-scale pop music presence as the 1980s and 1990s progressed, along with crossover appeal with fans of Tejano music pioneers

Lydia Mendoza Lydia Mendoza (May 31, 1916December 20, 2007) was a Mexican-American guitarist and singer of Tejano and traditional Mexican-American music. Historian Michael Joseph Corcoran has stated that she was "The Mother of Tejano Music", an art form that ...

and Little Joe. With later

Hispanic and Latino Americans Hispanic and Latino Americans ( es, Estadounidenses hispanos y latinos; pt, Estadunidenses hispânicos e latinos) are Americans of Spanish and/or Latin American ancestry. More broadly, these demographics include all Americans who identify as ...

seeing success within pop music charts, 1990s pop successes stayed popular in both their original genres and in broader pop music. Latin pop hit singles, such as " Macarena" by Los del Río and " Despacito" by Luis Fonsi, have seen record-breaking success on worldwide pop music charts.

21st century

At the beginning of the 2000s, the trends that dominated during the late 1990s still continued, but the music industry started to change as people began to download music from the internet. People were able to discover genres and artists that were outside of the mainstream and propel them to fame, but at the same time smaller artists had a harder time making a living because their music was being pirated. Popular artists were

Avril Lavigne Avril Ramona Lavigne ( ; born September 27, 1984) is a Canadian singer and songwriter. At age 16, she signed a two-album recording contract with Arista Records. Her debut studio album, ''Let Go (Avril Lavigne album), Let Go'' (2002), is the ...

NSYNC NSYNC (, ; also stylized as *NSYNC or 'N Sync) was an American boy band formed by Chris Kirkpatrick in Orlando, Florida, in 1995 and launched in Germany by BMG Ariola Munich. Their self-titled debut album was successfully released to European ...

, Christina Aguilera,

Destiny's Child Destiny's Child was an American girl group whose final line-up comprised Beyoncé Knowles, Kelly Rowland, and Michelle Williams. The group began their musical career as Girl's Tyme, formed in 1990 in Houston, Texas. After years of limited ...

, and

Britney Spears Britney Jean Spears (born December 2, 1981) is an American singer. Often referred to as the " Princess of Pop", she is credited with influencing the revival of teen pop during the late 1990s and early 2000s. After appearing in stage productio ...

. Pop music often came from many different genres, with each genre in turn influencing the next one, blurring the lines between them and making them less distinct. This change was epitomized in the album FutureSex/LoveSounds, which under the influence of producer Timbaland, mixed the sounds of R&B, dance music, and hip hop. By the year 2010, pop music impacted by dance music came to be dominant on the charts. Instead of the radio setting the trends, it was now the club. "The new bubble is all the collective clubs around the world. Radio is just doing its best to keep up," said Will.i.am. at the beginning of the decade. Songs that talked of escapism through partying became the most popular, influenced by the impulse to forget the economic troubles that had taken over the world after the

2008 crash The Great Recession was a period of marked general decline, i.e. a recession, observed in national economies globally that occurred from late 2007 into 2009. The scale and timing of the recession varied from country to country (see map). At t ...

. The most popular artists of this era were Justin Bieber,

Rihanna Robyn Rihanna Fenty ( ; born February 20, 1988) is a Barbadian singer, actress, and businesswoman. Born in Saint Michael and raised in Bridgetown, Barbados, Rihanna auditioned for American record producer Evan Rogers who invited her to the ...

, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, the Black Eyed Peas,

Katy Perry Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson (born October 25, 1984), known professionally as Katy Perry, is an American singer, songwriter, and television personality. Known for her influence on modern pop music and her Camp (style), campy style, she has been ...

and One Direction

References

External links

The Consumption of Music and the Expression of Values: A Social Economic Explanation for the Advent of Pop Music
Wilfred Dolfsma, '' American Journal of Economics and Sociology'', October 1999. {{DEFAULTSORT:Pop Music Western culture 1920s neologisms Music genres