Pop Article Url
Pop article url: http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com:80/subscriber/article/grove/music/46845 A term applied to a particular group of popular music styles. Originating mostly in the USA and Britain, from the 1950s on, these styles have subsequently spread to most parts of the world. In Western countries, and in many others too, they became the predominant popular music styles of the second half of the 20th century. Closely connected with the development of new media and music technologies, and with the growth of large-scale recording and broadcasting industries, mostly based in the West, pop music has generally been associated with young people. However, audiences have tended to broaden in the later part of the period. At the same time, new centres of production have emerged, including Japan, Africa and Australasia. By this time, in many parts of the world, pop music styles, derivatives and hybrids, could be regarded as the vernacular lingua franca. I. Introduction The term pop music originated in Britain in the mid-1950s as a description for ROCK AND ROLL and the new youth music styles that it influenced, and seems to have been a spin-off from the terms pop art and pop culture, coined slightly earlier, and referring to a whole range of new, often American, media-culture products. The etymology is less important than the sense, widespread at the time on both sides of the Atlantic, that in both musical styles and cultural patterns a decisive break was taking place. Indeed, in the early 1960s ‘pop music’ competed terminologically with BEAT MUSIC, while in the USA its coverage overlapped (as it still does) with that of ‘rock and roll’.
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