Pop music is a slang derived from ‘popular’ music but the meaning still stays the same. It is normally recognised as musically simple tunes, aimed at children and young adults and commercial produced and marketed.
It is in general aimed towards the younger generation and is the basis for much of youth culture, from clothing fashions to make-up and hair styles and even through to making certain branded vehicles popular through artist endorsements.
Popular music is often seen by older generations as a noise and not as melodic as music from times gone by, but most pop music has simple clean melodies and easy to remember rhythms, which may be the reason for its recognition and enjoyment from the very young through to the older youth.
Pop music is mainly orientated towards the singles chart, which is a weekly countdown of the most singles sold of downloaded in a week. Whilst a huge number of records need not be sold in a week to achieve a good listing, the extra radio and TV time that would be afforded to the music upon reaching the top of the singles chart is great publicity. Pop music also sometimes finds itself the home of cartoon characters singing songs or the odd comedy charity record, again falling into the popular music genre by the simple and effective tunes.
The term popular music was first coined in the 1920s to define exactly that, music which was popular at the time. Around the 1950s pop music was more rock and roll, it was not until the late 1960s that pop took out along a different avenue to that of rock music.
Whilst pop music is recognisable by all, and favoured by the younger generations, it has roots from classical, jazz and folk music. The use of certain vocal harmonies is reminiscent of gospel music, funky rhythms can be traced back to street RnB whilst using the spoken word in music is seated from rap.
In a nutshell, pop music is aimed at production and selling lots of records. It favours recordability over live performance and is aimed at pleasing the mass market rather than being technically proficient and focussed towards a specific taste.