Noun

Singular pop music

Plural uncountable

pop music (uncountable)

1. Music intended for or accepted by a wide audience.

   Pop music, despite its commercial focus, includes many artistic gems.

Related terms

• pop
• pop culture

Pop music is a music genre that developed from the mid-1950s as a softer alternative to rock and roll and later to rock music. It has a focus on commercial recording, often oriented towards a youth market, usually through the medium of relatively short and simple love songs. While these basic elements of the genre have remained fairly constant, pop music has absorbed influences from most other forms of popular music, particularly borrowing from the development of rock music, and utilizing key technological innovations to produce new variations on existing themes.

Terminology

The term "pop song" is first recorded as being used in 1926 in the sense of a piece of music "having popular appeal". Starting in the 1950s the term "pop music" has been used to describe a distinct genre, aimed at a youth market, often characterized as a softer alternative to rock and roll. In the aftermath of the British Invasion, from about 1967, it was increasingly used in opposition to the term rock music, to describe a form that was more commercial, ephemeral and accessible. Although pop music is often seen as oriented towards the singles charts, as a genre it is not the sum of all chart music, which have 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.

Quotes about Pop music

Sourced

• The attitude to sexual love in the "pop" song is so ugly and mechanical as to seem schizoid, and psychopathological. Exposed as they are to such powerful cultural statements, young people are being encouraged to forfeit genuine commitment in love in favour of depersonalised sexual activity, with an undercurrent of violence, and to take false solutions in which they must deny their deepest needs, by hate.
  • David Holbrook, in Pop and Truth, as quoted in The Sociology of Rock (1978) by Simon Frith, ISBN 0094602204

• Pop music is probably the only art form that is totally dependent for its success on the general public. The more people buy a record, the more successful it is — not only commercially but artistically.
  • Manfred Mann, quoted in The Sociology of Rock (1978) by Simon Frith

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