Research Into Genre

Pop music originated in its modern form in the 1950s, deriving from rock and roll. As a genre, pop music is very eclectic, often borrowing elements from other styles including urban, dance, rock, Latin and country. However there are core elements which define pop. Such include generally short-to-medium length songs, written in a basic format (often the verse-chorus structure), as well as the common employment of repeated choruses, melodic tunes, and catchy hooks.

 

Characteristics

Musicologists often identify the following characteristics as typical of the pop music genre:

• an aim of appealing to a general audience, rather than to a particular sub-culture or ideology
• an emphasis on craftsmanship rather than formal "artistic" qualities
• an emphasis on recording, production, and technology, over live performance
• a tendency to reflect existing trends rather than progressive developments
• much pop music is intended to encourage dancing, or it uses dance-oriented beats or rhythms

Definitions

David Hatch and Stephen Millward define pop music as "a body of music which is distinguishable from popular, jazz, and folk musics".

Although pop music is often seen as oriented towards the singles charts it is not the sum of all chart music, which has always contained songs from a variety of sources, including classical, jazz, rock, and novelty songs, while pop music as a genre is usually seen as existing and developing separately.

Influences and development

The term "pop song" is first recorded as being used in 1926, in the sense of a piece of music "having popular appeal".

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 and hillbilly music.

Since the late 1950s, however, pop has had the special meaning of non-classical music, usually in the form of songs, performed by such artists as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, ABBA, etc".

In the early 1960s [the term] 'pop music' competed terminologically with Beat music [in England], while in the USA its coverage overlapped (as it still does) with that of 'rock and roll'".

From about 1967 the term was increasingly used in opposition to the term rock music, a division that gave generic significance to both terms.

Influences and development

Pop music has absorbed influences from most 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, country, and rock music, orchestration from classical music, tempo from dance music, backing from electronic music, rhythmic elements from hip-hop music, and has recently appropriated spoken passages from rap.

It has also made use of technological innovation. In the 1940s improved microphone design allowed a more intimate singing style.

Another technological change was the widespread availability of television in the 1950s; with televised performances, "pop stars had to have a visual presence". In the 1960s, the introduction of inexpensive, portable transistor radios meant that teenagers could listen to music outside of the home.

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 non-Western countries, such as Japan, have developed a thriving pop music industry, most of which is devoted to Western-style pop, has for several years has produced a greater quantity of music of everywhere except the USA.