What is Pop Music?

No, just no.

 

Well if I may finish what I was saying: "...but a better way of assessing it is a song's crossover appeal beyond a particular subculture/group."

 

Popular song form. I guess it’s definition is instinctive. No need to look down on it. It takes skill insight and craft to do it well. Like all music.

 

If I were trying to characterize pop stylistically, I'd say something like this: it's music that arose in the vaudeville, tin pan alley and broadway/showtunes traditions, initially evolving in the later 19th century (though rooted in earlier 19th century folk traditions a la composers such as Stephen Foster, also with some influences from light opera/operetta), very commercially-oriented, with catchy/hook-laden, verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus-type song structures, often either ballad or dance-oriented, and that along the way has absorbed and incorporated elements of other popular styles such as jazz, rock, disco and hip-hop without simply being "just jazz," "just rock," "just disco," "just hip-hop," etc. Meanwhile it's been one of the primary influences on those other genres as well.

But yeah, as I said before, it's good $#!t. It's one of my favorite genres, from its origins all the way to now.

 

Also the music industry, for its part and due to commercial reasons, has emphasized genres in various ways.

 

It's a bit of everything!

But perhaps not too much of it.

I wholeheartedly agree. Very good $#!t

 

I don't think that writing pop songs is any easier or more difficult than writing any other music. Many great pop songs have been written very quickly. Others have been laboured over.

 

Historically I think pop music existed in oppositon to classical music.

For example, I was reading a history of jukeboxes today and came across this :

By the late 30s, a price war erupted between the majors vying for space in jukeboxes, lowering the price of records sold to their operators to as little as 20 cents each. Offsetting these slim profit margins was a resurgent market in classical music, which always sold in lower volumes but at much higher prices than pop records.

 

Pop music always existed. It was always the music of the common folk. It was all about the class system. The wealthy were able to go to classical/opera shows. When the record industry came along, the same tier system prevailed. When rock & roll came along and spread to the "mainstream" audiences, it was heavily criticized as the music of the less intelligent, so to speak.

 

Shoobie doobie do wop
I wanna dedicate this
Pop pop shoo wop
Everybody made it
Shoobie doobie do wop
Infiltrate it
Pop pop shoo wop
Activate it

 

NSYNC tried to tell us back in 2001....



Joking aside, Wikipedia defines "pop music" as:

Pop music - Wikipedia

Pop 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 encompassed rock and roll and the youth-oriented styles it influenced. Rock and pop 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 seen as 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, Latin, and country.

Depending on the song, I like pop music as much as I like rock, country, and other genres of music. I grew up in the era of Backstreet Boys and NSYNC---it's pretty much ingrained in my musical psyche lol.

 

Of course, there's wikipedia to help us out!

Later on that page: "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."
Not sure it's necessary for the artist to aim to appeal to the general population for it to be pop music. It's enough for it to just appeal to a general audience. Is Oliver's Army a pop song?

 

Sorry, of course I read the complete sentence, but what I'm getting at is, pop isn't just the process of seeking popularity anymore, but actually has also become a definable genre as a sound, in the same manner of "I know a hit when I hear one", without being tethered to that search for audience response.

My first example in that earlier thread was dodie Clark, who, yes, has become very popular while remaining outside the mainstream, but I've been following her for about four years now, and that is just simply the way she writes, moreso than the way she writes to get mainstream appeal. It doesn't seem to be affirmation she's after, just the process and infrastructure that gives her a place to "write the worlds down, and get them out".

Another female artist with a strong hook sense and terribly mature writing abilities for her age, is Norway's Aurora, who has often stated she had to come to grips with public performing because she was really just interested in the creation of music, and there is no other artist on my radar who is more "in her own little world" as far as engagement with the popstar aspiration. And this sounds pretty naive, knowing full well she's recorded for Disney, and works through Decca, and her own country's Glasnote label; but she really walks the walk.

 

I think it usually refers to top 40 type of music, accessible to mass audience....but I think it's a pretty generic term..there are also different sub-genres like dream pop, jangle pop, synthpop, folk pop....

I was just listening to this song about Pop kids loving the pop hits

Pet Shop Boys - The Pop Kids

 

I think you got pushback because it's become sport for some old people to gripe about how much "new music sucks" and how the death of terrestrial radio as the main way people find out about music *must* mean that there's no good music out there.

They can't really fathom that YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, and Spotify/Apple Music playlists have simply replaced radio as the way people find out about new music. They certainly can't fathom that all new music is not autotuned, that rock still lives (even if it isn't exactly like it was in 1971), and that young people are in fact 1) interested in good music, and 2) capable of producing good music.

But I digress.

 

yeah, but mainstream today for some reason has much less rock/alternative crossover? Don't you think so? For example U2, The Cure, New Order, Depeche Mode, REM were all 80's alternative crossovers to mainstream, and all had pop hits known even by casual listeners. Is there as much of that today?

 

I mean, I haven't quantified it, but there are absolutely rock bands that have very popular albums that chart in high positions these days. Though people have been talking about the so-called death of rock basically ever since it started, so I shouldn't be surprised.

 

No, there isn't because Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, et al...has made it easier for people to musically isolate themselves. If you're into death metal, that's all you hear. If you're into rap, that's all you hear. If you're into electronic, that's all you hear. It has always been that way for country music, too, but that's more because, until the 90s, the audience for that music was also isolated.

Terrestrial radio, as it was in the 60s and 70s, forced people to be exposed to other types of music. That all changed starting in the mid 70s when radio decided they could better target certain audiences by restricting playlists to certain genres of music, and, of course, you had audiences who were more than receptive to that type of programming. This type of genre segregation had always been there, but it kicked into overdrive with disco and hard rock formats.

 

For me, pop is more about song structure, than about actual popularity.

With very few exceptions, pop tends to be: in 4/4 time, 3 chords, in verse>chorus>bridge format, has easily to sing along with verses and choruses, has a hook, and usually under 4 minutes. Whether a musician or band writes/performs a song that follows this format and becomes a major hit, or the musician writes/performs songs in this format, and they struggle in obscurity, is pretty much meaningless to me. It's the format that lacks interest for me.

There are a very few exceptions, that I can point to, that while I wouldn't go out of my way to listen to, if they came on the radio, I'd be fine listening to them. XTC, Be Bop Deluxe, 10CC, Roxy Music, Porcupine Tree, Beatles, and a few more, that have all written songs the pop format, that are well crafted, and can be a fun diversionary listen. But I would also be fine never hearing any of them again, either.

 

The reason is obvious. TikTok, YouTube, Twitter and Spotify/Apple/everything else, is not the one, overarching medium that radio was in older people's day. Back then, even if there were elitists who only listened at record store listening booths and dorm rooms, "Radio" was the medium, and it was the only medium you could point to as the general population's barometer. No other. Not Ed Sullivan on a good night, not who was playing a residence in Vegas, and not who was raking-in the most concert tickets that week. If you weren't on Casey Kasem's short list, or letting Dick Clark's kids opine, "got a good beat, you can dance to it", you just didn't matter. And that only happened, because radio was the single arbiter of taste to the general public.

Now you can have streaming services, websites and platforms all agree with each other that "Doja Cat is a 'thing'", but adding all these disparate voices together is not the same thing as saying, "well, Mr. Deejay likes it".

 

If standard pop song structure is your measure, then most music we talk about here is pop: most rock, most country, most jazz, most everything that's not 12 bar blues or structured like an ancient murder ballad, and those two are most everything else. New music may have more or less novel chord changes but it still has verses and choruses and sometimes bridges, doesn't it?

 

Pop is just folk music that makes money.

 

yeah but that simple song structure translates into a wider appeal of a song, and thus popularity. Like Roxette said, don't bore us get to the chorus.

 

And honestly, I think that’s a good thing! It really opens things up more.