Until the late 1960s, pop and rock meant roughly the same thing
Pop music took its modern shape in mid-1950s America and Britain, and for over a decade the word simply covered rock and roll and the youth styles it spawned. Only around 1967 did pop and rock split, with pop becoming the label for music seen as commercial, short-lived and easy to love.
Most definitions point to the same ingredients: choruses and hooks that repeat, songs of short to middling length built on a simple frame such as verse and chorus, and rhythms that invite dancing. Pop also borrows freely from rock, hip-hop, dance, Latin and country. The trouble is that popular music, which covers anything aimed at a mass audience as opposed to art music, is often used as a synonym. David Hatch and Stephen Millward insist pop is a body of music distinct from popular, jazz and folk traditions.
Others define it by exposure. Researcher David Boyle counts as pop whatever a person has encountered through mass media, noting that the charts themselves mix classical, jazz, rock and novelty records. As a genre, though, pop is often described as instant, singles-driven music for teenagers, set against rock's album-based music for adults. Bill Lamb frames popular music more broadly as whatever since nineteenth-century industrialisation best matched the tastes of the urban middle class.
The vocabulary has a history. The phrase pop song first appeared in 1926 for a tune with wide appeal, and Hatch and Millward see the birth of the modern pop industry in 1920s recordings of country, blues and hillbilly music. The New Grove Dictionary traces pop music as a term to mid-1950s Britain, describing rock and roll and its offshoots, and notes that in early-1960s England it competed with the label beat music, while in America it overlapped with rock and roll. The Oxford Dictionary of Music adds that an older sense meant concerts for a broad public, but from the late 1950s pop meant non-classical songs by acts such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and ABBA.
After the late-1960s split, rock claimed ambition and authenticity. The British musicologist Simon Frith argued that pop is made as enterprise rather than art, designed to please everyone without belonging to any place or taste, driven chiefly by profit, musically conservative, and delivered from above by labels, radio programmers and promoters rather than built from the ground up.
Source: Pop music
