Popular music was a sheet-music business long before records and radio
Before anyone could buy a record, popular music meant cheap printed sheet music, played by middle-class amateurs around the family piano. The song publishers of New York's Tin Pan Alley promoted new tunes relentlessly, and the term popular music first described their output in the 1880s. Every technology since has reshaped who hears what.
Popular music is not the same as pop. It is an umbrella for any widely appealing music spread through the industry and playable by people with little training, while pop is one genre within it. Scholars disagree over how to define it: by sales, which ignore repeat listening, by audience size, or by social class, which fits styles poorly. Pete Seeger called it professional music drawing on both folk and fine art traditions. Anahid Kassabian split it into populist, folk, countercultural and mass forms.
The piano made nineteenth-century home music possible because one player could supply melody, chords and bass. Public performances in pleasure gardens, dance halls and theatres grew too, and the Swedish opera star Jenny Lind became a sensation touring America in the mid-1800s. Around the turn of the century, player pianos let a skilled pianist's performance be replayed on other instruments, and then the gramophone arrived. By 1920 Britain alone had almost 80 record companies.
Radio from the early 1920s brought professional singers to listeners who could never afford concert tickets, and sound films at the end of that decade spread songs further. Television variety shows took over in the 1950s and 1960s, and multitrack recording turned engineers and producers into creative forces, letting singers back themselves up. From the 1960s to the mid-2000s the album dominated English-language listening, and digital files later made it far easier for songs to cross borders.
Most songs share a sectional shape: verses with the same melody but new words, a repeated chorus carrying the hook, and a bridge that appears once for contrast. The classic thirty-two-bar form stacks four eight-bar sections as AABA. Critic Robert Christgau coined semipopular in 1970 for records such as The Velvet Underground that sounded accessible yet never charted.
Source: Popular music
