Short answers, pulled from the story.
Kedar Massenburg, a music industry entrepreneur at Motown Records, coined the term neo soul in the late 1990s as a marketing category. He established the record label Kedar Entertainment Inc. in 1995 and used the term to describe the style emerging from soul and contemporary R&B. The success of D'Angelo's 1995 debut album Brown Sugar is widely credited as the inspiration behind the term.
Music journalists credit four albums with shaping and raising neo soul to commercial visibility: D'Angelo's Brown Sugar (1995), Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite (1996), Erykah Badu's Baduizm (1997), and Lauryn Hill's The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998). Baduizm sold nearly three million copies and won two Grammy Awards; Hill's album earned five Grammy Awards and achieved massive sales.
Neo soul is distinguished by live instrumentation, album-oriented production, and conscious personal lyrics, in contrast to the single-oriented, producer-driven, and sampling-heavy approach of contemporary R&B. The genre incorporates elements of funk, jazz fusion, hip hop, gospel, reggae, rock, and African music. Music author Anne Danielsen noted that neo soul artists in the late 1990s showed heightened experimentation at the microrhythmic level.
The Soulquarians were a musical collective that included D'Angelo, The Roots, Erykah Badu, Bilal, Mos Def, Common, James Poyser, J Dilla, and Q-Tip. The collective developed through the production work of Questlove and was described as producing "organic soul, natural R&B, boho-rap." Their most celebrated output was D'Angelo's album Voodoo (2000), which The New York Times called "a largely unslick, stubbornly idiosyncratic and genuinely great album."
Me'Shell NdegéOcello's 1993 debut album Plantation Lullabies is credited as the beginning of neo soul. Renee Graham of The Boston Globe called it "arguably the first shot in the so-called 'neo-soul' movement." Tony! Toni! Toné!'s 1993 album Sons of Soul is also cited as a key precursor to the mid-1990s soul revival.
Neo soul's mainstream presence declined during the 2000s, though newer artists continued to emerge through independent means. A late creative resurgence came through albums such as Maxwell's BLACKsummers'night (2009), Erykah Badu's New Amerykah Part Two (2010), and Frank Ocean's Channel Orange (2012). By August 2019, Okayplayer identified eleven emerging artists carrying the genre into its third decade.