Pop music is described as a commercially oriented type of music because it’s a composition mainly intended for the appreciation and consumption of wide audiences belonging to literate and tech-savvy urban societies. Pop music composers are known professional music makers who use advanced instrumentations that started to emerge during the Industrial Age.
What Makes Pop Music Different from Traditional Folk Music
Pop music is directly in contrast to folk music, which are basically historical in nature as they are songs composed by minstrels and troubadours who transmitted them orally while travelling across rural communities. Folk songs are basically a musical form of story-telling entertainment to anyone who cares to listen.
The Age of Industrialization propagated the emerging musical compositions of the Victorian Era while music halls, opera houses and vaudevilles became the mainstream venues for musical entertainment in the early 20th century.
Traditional music gradually eased out of the music scene during the early 19th century, as the so-called Tin Pan Alley emerged to dominate the song-publishing business during the second half of the century.
It was also the period when honky-tonk pianists popularized ragtime music, while theatrical productions known as musicals emerged. Producers offered live stage shows to deliver simple story lines with sentimental dialogues that served as cues for song and dance presentations.
Songs from musicals would spread easily as the pop music of the latter part of the 19th century.Actually, musical compositions were influenced by different musical genres that emerged in the 19th century. The live vaudeville-like shows had inspired the development of Broadway in New York, as the central hub for theatrical madio usic performances in America.
After World War II music audiences had more choices, partly due to advancements in music producing technology such as electronic musical instruments phonograps, microphones and the likes.
Radio broadcasting equipment had broadened the reach and extent of pop music. Radio shows became instrumental in promoting new styles of pop musical compositions in different regions, like country music, rock jazz, rhythm, blues and reggae.
As the 21 century emerged with more technological advancements, music audiences became more pop oriented. Pop music likewise evolved by having more contemporary musical genres such as Electronic Dance Music, Hip-Hop, Ethno Pop. Country Pop. Latin Pop, Indie Rock, Pop Punk and many more.