What is Pop Music?

Pop music is the genre of popular music that produces the most hits. A hit is a song that sells many copies, and the latest hits are listed every week on the charts. To get on the charts, a song must be released as a single, although most singles are also released on an album. Songs that become hits almost always share certain features that are sometimes called the pop-music formula. They have a good rhythm, a catchy melody, and are easy to remember and sing along to. They usually have a chorus that's repeated several times and two or more verses. Most pop songs are between two and five minutes long, and the lyrics are usually about the joys and problems of love and relationships. Pop songs are produced by groups like the boy band One Direction and the girl group Girls' Generation, and by pop singers like Justin Bieber and Madonna.

Photo: Madonna on stage with her musicians and dancers in Dallas, Texas, in 2012 (Mgct1506 CC BY-SA 3.0)

Not all hit singles are produced by pop artists. They're also produced by artists from many other genres like country music singers Carrie Underwood and Taylor Swift, rock groups Radiohead and Foo Fighters, folk singers Bob Dylan and Mumford & Sons, singer-songwriters Elton John and Ed Sheeran, contemporary R&B and soul music artists Beyonce and Adele, dance-music artists Daft Punk and Skrillex, and hip hop artists and rappers Kanye West and Eminem. Artists like these produce hit singles by writing songs that follow the pop-music formula but include elements of their own genre, and by doing this they can create their own unique style of pop music. Look at the list of best-selling artists below and notice how many have experience in more than one genre. It's artists like these who are most likely to create new styles of pop music in the future.

1. One Direction - English-Irish pop boy band who dance onstage while singing their many hit songs
2. Katy Perry - American pop and dance-pop artist who began her career singing gospel music
3. Beyonce - American pop and R&B singer who began her career in R&B girl group Destiny's Child
4. Taylor Swift - American pop singer-songwriter who began her career as a country music artist
5. Justin Timberlake - American soul, pop and R&B singer who began with the boy band NSYNC
6. Iggy Azalea - Australian rapper who created her own style of hip hop pop after moving to the US
7. Ariana Grande - American pop, R&B and dance-pop artist who began her career in musical theatre
8. Miley Cyrus - American pop singer who began her career as an actress and country music artist
9. Pharrell Williams - American hip hop artist who's also produced funk, soul, dance and pop hits
10. Eminem - American hip hop producer and rapper who was the best-selling US artist in the 2000s

Billboard magazine 2015

You can learn a lot more music vocab, and learn all about the history of popular music and its other main genres of rock, country, soul, dance and hip hop, by checking out the other pages here in EnglishClub's music section.