Concert List

Pop music is a liberal and vague category of modern music not marked by artistic considerations but by its promising listeners or future market. Pop is music composed with calculated objective to influence the majority of its contemporaries.

In contrast to music that calls for education or arrangement to appreciate, a serious characteristic of pop music is that everybody is able to enjoy it. Artistic ideas such as complex musical form and aesthetics are not a matter in the writing of pop songs, the key aim being listeners satisfaction and commercial triumph. Although the aim of pop music is to sell records and do really well in the charts, it doesn’t require broad  acclaim or commercial success. There are bad or unsuccessful pop songs.

Originally the term has been an abbreviation of, and synonymous to, popular music, but developed around 1954 to express a specific musical category. The stylistic origins of pop music is folk, jazz, Rythm and Blues, rock and roll, traditional pop music. The typical instruments are electric guitar, bass guitar, drum kit and keyboard. The cultural origins date back to 1950’s in the USA. It is popular globally since 1960s.

The standard format of pop music is the song, regularly less than five minutes in length. The instrumentation could range from an orchestra to a lone singer. In spite of this expansive  choice, a standard lineup in a pop performer includes a drive guitarist, a bassist, a drummer (or an electronic drum machine), a keyboardist and one or more singers, generally not themselves instrumentalists.

Pop songs are generally conspicuous by a heavy rhythmic element, a mainstream style and traditional structure. The most common modification is strophic in form and focuses on memorable melodies, catchy hooks and the appeal of the verse-chorus-verse arrangement, with the chorus sharply contrasting the verse melodically, rhythmically and harmonically.

Lyrics in pop compositions are usually easy and speak of universal experiences and feelings, moving away from incomprehensible or debatable issues.The international appeal of pop has been evident in the new millennium, with performers from around the world influencing the genre and Regional variants merging with the mainstream. As of 2008, pop music is now currently the the majority popular style of music of youth culture, making competition with hip hop, dance and country.