Pop music

• 1. Introduction

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  The term "pop song" was first used in 1926, describing a piece of music "having popular appeal". Pop music as we know it today did not arrive until the mid-1950s, born at the same moment in the United States and the United Kingdom. For a while, nobody could tell it apart from rock and roll. The two words meant nearly the same thing until the late 1960s, when pop split off to mean something more commercial, more ephemeral, more accessible. So what exactly is pop music, if even the people who study it struggle to draw its edges? When Billboard tried to compile a list of the 500 best pop songs in October 2023, they admitted there is no real sonic or musical definition to it. This is the story of a genre defined less by sound than by its reach, its machinery, and its relentless drift across decades and continents.

• 2. Defining The Undefinable

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  David Hatch and Stephen Millward called pop "a body of music which is distinguishable from popular, jazz, and folk music". That distinction matters, because the words "popular music" and "pop music" are often swapped without thought. Music researcher David Boyle took a broader view, treating pop as any type of music a person has been exposed to through the mass media. Most people, though, assume pop means the singles charts rather than the whole sum of chart music. Those charts actually hold songs from classical, jazz, rock, and even novelty sources. As a genre, pop is seen to exist and develop on its own, often described as "instant singles-based music aimed at teenagers". Rock, by contrast, gets cast as "album-based music for adults". Music writer Bill Lamb framed popular music as "the music since industrialization in the 1800s that is most in line with the tastes and interests of the urban middle class". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians places the term's origin in Britain in the mid-1950s, attached to rock and roll and the youth styles it influenced. The Oxford Dictionary of Music notes the word once meant concerts for a wide audience, then narrowed to non-classical songs by artists like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and ABBA. Around 1967 came the sharpest break of all, when pop and rock were set in opposition to each other.

• 3. Enterprise Not Art

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  British musicologist Simon Frith argued that pop music is produced "as a matter of enterprise not art". It is "designed to appeal to everyone" but "doesn't come from any particular place or mark off any particular taste". Frith was blunt about its motives. He said pop is "not driven by any significant ambition except profit and commercial reward" and "in musical terms, it is essentially conservative". The control flows downward, in his telling. Pop is "provided from on high" by record companies, radio programmers, and concert promoters, "rather than being made from below". It is "not a do-it-yourself music but is professionally produced and packaged". Frith offered three identifying traits: light entertainment, commercial imperatives, and personal identification. Pop grew out of an easy listening and light entertainment tradition, and it tends to dodge themes of resistance, opposition, or politics. Instead, many songs circle love and relationships, seeking instant empathy through cliche personalities, stereotypes, and melodrama. Music scholar Timothy Warner added that pop emphasizes recording, production, and technology over live performance. It reflects existing trends rather than progressive developments, and it pushes its listeners toward dancing.

• 4. Anatomy Of A Hook

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  The main medium of pop is the song, usually running between two and a half and three and a half minutes. It carries a consistent rhythmic element, a mainstream style, and a simple traditional structure. Many songs follow a verse and a chorus, the chorus built to stick in the ear through plain repetition, both musically and lyrically. The chorus is often where the music builds, frequently preceded by "the drop", the moment where the bass and drum parts drop out. Common variants include the verse-chorus form and the thirty-two-bar form, prizing melody and catchy hooks. The beat and the melodies stay simple, with limited harmonic accompaniment. Harmony in pop has been called "that of classical European tonality, only more simple-minded". Familiar cliches include the barbershop quartet-style harmony of ii, V, I, and blues scale-influenced harmony. Between the mid-1950s and the late 1970s, the influence of the circle of fifths weakened, with less predominance for the dominant function.

• 5. Machines That Made The Sound

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  In the 1940s, improved microphone design let singers adopt a more intimate style. A decade or two later, cheap and durable 45 rpm records for singles "revolutionized the manner in which pop has been disseminated", pushing it toward a record, radio, and film star system. The widespread arrival of television in the 1950s added televised performances, which meant pop stars suddenly needed a visual presence. In the 1960s, inexpensive portable transistor radios let teenagers in the developed world listen outside the home. By the early 1980s, music television channels like MTV had reshaped promotion, favoring strongly visual artists such as Michael Jackson and Madonna. Multi-track recording from the 1960s and digital sampling from the 1980s became tools for building and elaborating pop. The 1960s also gave producers room to experiment, heard in Phil Spector's Wall of Sound and Joe Meek's homemade electronic effects for acts such as the Tornados. Studio musicians, properly arranged and rehearsed, layered reverb-drenched electric guitar, symphonic strings, and horns over the old refined Tin Pan Alley sound.

• 6. Progress And Its Discontents

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  During the mid-1960s, pop made repeated forays into new sounds, styles, and techniques that sparked public discourse among listeners. The word "progressive" came up often, with the expectation that every single should be a progression from the last. Music critic Simon Reynolds writes that from 1967 a divide opened between "progressive" pop and "mass/chart" pop. That split, he notes, was also broadly "one between boys and girls, middle-class and working-class". The latter half of the 20th century blurred the boundaries between art and pop, after a long debate of pop versus art running between 1950 and 1970. Since then, certain music publications have embraced pop's legitimacy, a trend called "poptimism". Before progressive pop took hold, performers were usually unable to decide the artistic content of their music. The mid-1960s economic boom changed that, as record labels invested in artists and offered limited control over their content and marketing. That freedom declined after the late 1970s and would not return until the rise of Internet stars. Indie pop, emerging in the late 1970s, broke from the glamour by insisting musicians could record and release their own work without a major label contract.

• 7. A Restless Sound

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  A 2016 Scientific Reports study examined over 464,000 recordings of popular music made between 1955 and 2010. Compared with 1960s pop, contemporary pop used a smaller variety of pitch progressions, greater average volume, less diverse instrumentation, and less timbral variety. Scientific American's John Matson reported this seemed to support the anecdotal sense that older pop was "better", or at least more varied, while cautioning the study might not represent every generation. A 2019 study at New York University asked 643 participants to rank how familiar pop songs felt. Songs from the 1960s proved the most memorable, significantly more so than songs from 2000 to 2015. The 1980s brought a surge in digital recording and synthesizers, with synth-pop and other electronic genres rising. By 2014, electronic dance music had permeated pop worldwide. In 2018, researchers at the University of California, Irvine, concluded that pop had grown "sadder" since the 1980s, its happiness and brightness replaced by electronic beats that made it "sad yet danceable". Early pop had drawn on traditional pop, an American counterpart to German Schlager and French Chanson, leaning on Tin Pan Alley songwriting, Broadway theatre, and show tunes before absorbing classical, folk, rock, country, and electronic influences.

• 8. A Global Monoculture

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  Dominated by the American and, from the mid-1960s, British industries, pop became something of an international monoculture. Yet most regions developed their own forms, sometimes producing local versions of wider trends, sometimes shaping trends like Europop that fed back into the genre. Grove Music Online describes how Western-derived pop styles spread worldwide to form stylistic common denominators in global commercial music cultures. Japan built a thriving industry largely devoted to Western-style pop, producing for several years a greater quantity of music than everywhere except the US. Observers have read this spread variously as Americanization, homogenization, modernization, creative appropriation, cultural imperialism, or globalization. Latin pop rose in the US during the 1950s with early rock and roll success Ritchie Valens. Los Lobos and Chicano rock gained ground in the 1970s and 1980s, and Selena saw large-scale popularity across the 1980s and 1990s, with crossover appeal among fans of Tejano musicians Lydia Mendoza and Little Joe. Latin hits like "Macarena" by Los del Río and "Despacito" by Luis Fonsi later broke records on worldwide charts. In the 2020s, the Weeknd's "Blinding Lights" reached the top of Billboard's greatest Hot 100 songs of all time, surpassing "The Twist" by Chubby Checker, and became the first song to reach five billion streams on Spotify.