Throughout its development, pop music has absorbed influences from most
other genres of popular music. Early pop music drew on the sentimental
ballad for its form, gained its use of vocal harmonies from gospel
and soul
music, instrumentation from jazz and rock music, orchestration from classical
music, tempo from dance music, backing from electronic
music and has recently appropriated spoken passages from rap. It has
also made use of technological innovation, being itself made possible by the
invention of the electronic microphone and the vinyl
record, and adopting multi-track recording and digital sampling as methods for the creation and
elaboration of pop music. Pop music was also communicated largely through the mass media,
including radio, film, TV and, particularly since the 1980s, video.
Pop music has been dominated by the American (and from the mid-1960s British) music
industries, whose influence has made pop music something of an
international monoculture, but most regions and countries have their
own form of pop music, sometimes producing local versions of wider trends, and
lending them local characteristics. Some of these trends (for example Europop) have had
a significant impact of the development of the genre.
Spring preview — Pop music: Concerts are unusual but promising Washington Post Looking at this spring's concert calendar is a bit like staring off into a live music Twilight Zone. Big names are cautiously playing small rooms (Lauryn Hill headlines the cozy Warner Theater on Feb. 29), while young rock bands are brazenly taking aim ... |