Pop Music

Some people love pop music and others hate it. Pop music is designed to appeal commercially, so it attempts to reach out to a wider audience. Pop songs are easy to listen to and the tunes are catchy, which makes them either attractive or repulsive depending on your perspective. The attractive element is that pop music fits any occasion and it’s easy to get listening pleasure out of. On the repulsive side, pop songs can be devoid of meaning, they’re designed to sell rather than to excel, and the repeating choruses can get repetitive.

Pop music might seem simple and straightforward, but it’s actually not such an easy genre to define. Criticism of pop music is usually aimed at the Top Billboard and its bubblegum offerings. But critics might think twice about blasting “pop music” when they realize that the Beatles fall under the pop category just like Britney Spears does. This is because pop music derives so many different influences, whether it’s rock, hip hop, punk, R&B, disco, country or Latin. Pop music doesn’t have one exact type of sound, one set of instruments, or one kind of singer.

What holds the pop music genre together is its commercial aspect. Pop songs, regardless of their components, are intended to be marketable and easily digestible by the public. Pop music wants to draw in the whole crowd instead of a specific demographic so that it’ll have more customers. The pop genre also tends to promote singles rather than albums, building up anticipation around a hot song and keeping it on the billboard, and its songs tend to be in a specific length range of 2 ½ minutes to 5 ½ minutes to make them more radio playable. Pop songs are crafted to fit this time standard and equipped with verse and choruses to keep listeners hooked. Finally, pop music focuses largely on the present and what’s happening now, so often it’s full of references to current trends or pop culture. Overall, it’s not inaccurate to say that pop songs are largely manufactured. This doesn’t mean that pop artists can’t be talented—many pop artists can really sing, and the ones that can demonstrate this when they perform live, but often their songs are provided to them and polished off nicely in clean recordings.

But as short lived as pop music might seem, ironically it will continue to last throughout generations. Britney Spears and Michael Jackson, the princess and king of pop respectively, still dominate much of the pop music industry this day, the King of Pop even doing so after his passing. The pop genre gathers a large following through singular promotions and will thrive as long as it can accomplish this.