Pop Music History

Pop music is a genre of popular music that originated in its modern form in the western world during the 1950’s and 1960’s. Pop is a genre which pulls in parts from other styles and genres such as urban, dance, rock, country, etc, to make it its own unique genre. Pop music is seen to develop this more recently as seen from similar instruments seen in country, and rock, taking its rhythm from hip hop, tempo from dance, and even including passages from rap.

In Nielsen’s Music 360 study in 2014, “93% of the country’s population listens to music” with “75% of respondents (saying) they actively chose to listen to music, even ahead of watching television at 73%”. The number of people that prefer to listen to music can be considered enormous and as the population grows, so does that number. This only goes to show how music has become commonplace in our lives such that “most U.S. residents listen to roughly four hours and five minutes of audio each day” (Stutz). As the world changes and new innovations emerge however, so does how we, as consumers, enjoy music. Over the years, there has been a gradual shift from physical copies of music such as CDs to their digital counterparts. As shown in the

A large amount of people nowadays, like a douche named Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys, believe that popular, or “pop”, music is unoriginal, overrated, meaningless trash, and often times not considered music. Sure, there are plenty of idiotically synthesized songs, unneeded auto-tuned voices, with unfortunately cliché lyrics, and a seemingly endless repetition of the chorus, provided at this contemporary time musicians who follow that pattern are unable to make it or stay in the music business. Pop music is just a new form of song that can appeal to the modern masses.

The modern form of Pop Music was created in the 1950’s. It wasn’t until the first top twenty that pop music charts came into existence. Pop music was essentially developed from rock and roll music. Although, the term pop music first became a thing in the middle of the 1920’s. Pop was basically short for popular or it meant that the music had a popular appeal. Many genres of music today could be considered as pop music including blues, folk, rock, hip-hop, R&B, dance, electronic, country, and many other types of music. This style of music really became what it is today after the rock and roll era. When the rock and roll era began to disappear is when the pop music genre came to be. It was a lighter, smoother version of rock and roll music. Pop music was influenced by rock and roll’s style, beats, and arrangements.

In the following decade of the 1960s Rock n’ Roll music became more accepted and began to evolve from the Rockabilly sound audiences have grown to know before to a freer sound. However, the 1960s was also the time of the infamous saying “Sex, Drugs, and Rock n’ Roll” became the reality of the newly found style of music.

As Billie Joe Armstrong puts it “ music to me is the air that I breathe, it's the blood that pumps through my veins that keeps me alive”. In this paper I will be discussing how technology has affected the music industry as a whole and the musicians themselves. Music has slowly become an essential part of our lives. We listen to it on our way to work, while working out at the gym, even to put us to sleep sometimes and wake us up. When asked why is music so essential, most people would say that it is relatable and a way for people to express their feelings. Music has evolved in more ways than one, from the different types of genres to a whole different sound. The most impactful change however is the way that music is now streamed. We are in

Rock music has been very popular for years. Now-a-day’s rock has blended in with the other types of popular music like pop, country and rap. However, none of these other types of music seemed to have as big an impact on people that rock did. Rock ‘n roll, basically controlled the most of the twentieth century, with an entire era of children, teens and young adults to follow. But, where did rock come from? What is rock music, what started it? How did parents react?

Hi Folks, Sorry I have not written in awhile, life’s been great. However watching the most recent Grammy’s Awards and perusing what the music industry has become, sadly I can’t relate to the current music scene. Regrettably, Country sounds more like Hip Hop, Americana and Blues are considered Rock sound eerily similar to Country, and what’s worse Gwen Stefani New Live Video was no more than a advertising vehicle to promote Target. However, with a new year brings new hope and reflection as well to delve into the past. How poignant to rewind back 20 years to 1996. Let’s look back at the year in music for 1996. Feel free to click on the links to peruse the past.

Classic rock has become something of the past with most music now falling into some sort of rock sub-genre. Indie rock broke through the mainstream in the early 2010s. It is now one of the most successful genres of the decade. The top mainstream indie and alternative artists throughout this decade include The Black Keys, Twenty One Pilots, Neon Trees and Imagine Dragons. Today, there are many different styles of indie rock music. The low-fi style, epitomized by bands like Sonic Youth and Pavement, features an unpolished sound and frequent distortion. Artists like Belle and Sebastian, who play bouncy, mostly acoustic music, are sometimes called "twee pop."

As the human race evolves and changes, so does its creations, ideas, and environment; music is no exception to this. Peoples ever-longing desire for new ideas combined with the opposite need for stability has resulted, in the music world, in the creation of pop music, but what exactly is pop music? Upon light observation, some people find pop music to bland and repetitive, but with further investigation there, is an interesting amount of history behind America's favorite music style.

In the next few hours the living room at my grandfather's house would be filled with tunes of Neil Diamond and various groups of the 1950’s. Listening to vinyls this past summer really gave me a different perspective on music and how different the sound quality is today. As technology advances, my generation born after the 2000s, is really drifting away from technologies of the past. We have the privilege of music right at our fingertips with the internet and services such as iTunes. These technologies are distant from the days of vinyls, cassettes, and even CDs that dominated the 20th century. Although all the music content is right there, nothing is physically owned, which is a pro for vinyls. Additionally, people loved to collect the cover art on the vinyls which is something you cannot do on a digital screen. Another aspect is when music becomes digitized, it can lose some of its realism or value. In my case, listening to a vinyl with my eyes closed feels as if the artist is right there in the room. This effect has not been accomplished by digital music and allows a closer connection to the music when listening to vinyls. This trend of going back to vinyls shows the appreciation for the past and

The central purpose of this paper is to create a platform upon which we can better answer enterprising questions such as, “what is the difference between a ‘one-hit-wonder’ and a Beatles record?”, and “Is there a formula to writing a ‘timeless’ song, or are social trends alone the deciding factor?”. I have chosen this subject due to the relevance it has to the sociological relationship between music, time and audience – ‘new musicology’ as opposed to ethnomusicology. I am using time as a frame of reference upon which I will structure my analysis of the music industry’s trends and the bilateral social influence between songs and people over the decades. I will analyse case-studies from the 1960’s and the relevance of those case studies over our most recent decade. I will do this for every decade except for 2000-present as this would

The twentieth century impacted human kind in ways that those alive before the year 1900 never could have imagined. Those living during the final hundred years of the millennium saw incredible advances in science and technology that elevated our quality of life to the standard we enjoy today. Like so many other trades, the music industry benefited greatly from these new innovations. In turn, this new technology altered the sound of music: changing how it was performed, recorded, and sold. Glenn McDonald of Echo Nest tracked nine audio attributes across seventy years of music to identify trends in music that were changing. What he found was music became less organic, less bouncy, and less acoustic, while it gained accuracy, energy, sound,

The music industry is a diverse and ever-changing industry that has come a long way since its emergence in the mid 1600’s. (Morton) It now resides in a world that is almost entirely digital. According to Jerry Flattum, “The history of music publishing is really the history of the songs that made publishing possible. Every publisher’s success and reputation was based on it’s catalog, and mostly, how many hit songs were in that catalog.” (Flattum)

2017 has been a pretty awful year so far, and honestly, it’s on track to be even worse than 2016. Who knew that was possible? Despite the rising tensions regarding diversity in America, there is still one thing that can bring people from across all walks of life together: music. Music has the ability to transcend barriers of language, of culture, of politics, or anything that seeks to divide people on a daily basis. Music is a form of self-expression. Whether through music you create or music you love to listen to, you can learn a lot about others and yourself.