Popular music | Description, History, & Facts | Britannica (original) (raw)

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popular music, any commercially oriented music principally intended to be received and appreciated by a wide audience, generally in literate, technologically advanced societies dominated by urban culture. Unlike traditional folk music, popular music is written by known individuals, usually professionals, and does not evolve through the process of oral transmission.

Historically, popular music was any non-folk form that acquired mass popularity—from the songs of the medieval minstrels and troubadours to those elements of fine-art music originally intended for a small elite audience but that became widely popular. After the Industrial Revolution, true folk music began to disappear, and the popular music of the Victorian era and the early 20th century was that of the music hall and vaudeville, with its upper reaches dominated by waltz music and operettas. In the United States, minstrel shows performed the compositions of songwriters such as Stephen Foster. In the 1890s Tin Pan Alley emerged as the first popular song-publishing industry, and over the next half century its lyricism was combined with European operetta in a new kind of play known as the musical. Beginning with ragtime in the 1890s, African Americans began combining complex African rhythms with European harmonic structures, a synthesis that would eventually create jazz.

Music audiences greatly expanded, partly because of technology. By 1930 phonograph records had replaced sheet music as the chief source of music in the home. The microphone enabled more-intimate vocal techniques to be commercially adapted. The ability of radio broadcasting to reach rural communities aided the dissemination of new styles, notably country music. American popular music achieved international dominance in the decades after World War II.

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By the 1950s the migration of African Americans to cities in the North had resulted in the cross-fertilization of elements of blues with the up-tempo rhythms of jazz to create rhythm and blues. Rock and roll, pioneered by figures such as Elvis Presley, soon developed as an amalgam of rhythm and blues with country music and other influences (see rock music). In the 1960s British rock groups, including the Beatles, became internationally influential and popular. Rock and soul music (especially the sophisticated but hook-laden variety of the latter, which took its name from the company that created it, Motown) quickly attracted the allegiance of Western teenagers and eventually became the sound track for young people throughout the world. The history of pop into the 21st century has basically been that of rock and its variants, including disco, heavy metal, funk, punk, hip-hop, and increasingly pop-oriented world music.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThis article was most recently revised and updated by Pat Bauer.