Popular Music

Popular music describes music intended for consumption by a mass public, containing imagery and voicing feelings, needs, and desires of ordinary people, mostly about interpersonal love or loss. It also comments on, or protests, aspects of personal existence or public policy (or its lack). Most commonly, the term refers to music as a cultural commodity, created by professional musicians, recorded by and marketed by media corporations, to be sold to the mass public. Originally, the term denoted an authentic expressive creation by nonprofessional musicians, now sometimes called folk music (or related categories of country or blues or ethnic music), opposed to studio, professional, high, classical, or art music. Rarely in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries does popular music occur in an unmediated form. All popular ...