A History of Pop Music

The oldest layer is a way of making music. In the ring shout, documented from 1819 and rooted in West Central African ceremonies, participants move counterclockwise in a circle, clap, shuffle and sing. Four things are already present there: call and response, layered rhythm, blue notes, and a vocal technique that treats shouting as expression.

From about 1885, publishers around West 28th Street in Manhattan sold sheet music, not sound. Three consequences still run through the industry:

That organization outlived the sheet music itself. The same split between writer and singer returns at the Brill Building in the 1960s, at Motown from 1959, at the Swedish hit factories of the 1990s and in today's writing camps.

Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues" sold 75,000 copies in its first month in 1920, and the industry discovered a Black buying market it had been ignoring. The answer was segmentation. Okeh coined the term race records in 1922 for records by Black artists aimed at Black buyers, with hillbilly as the white southern counterpart: two catalogs, two distribution channels, two kinds of advertising.

The split was artificial. Black and white musicians in the South played each other's repertoire and shared songs and stages. The grid the labels laid over that then steered the music, because artists were pushed to sound like their category. Billboard renamed the chart Rhythm & Blues in June 1949, after journalist Jerry Wexler pointed out that race sat too close to racist.

Rock and roll is the point where two separate catalogs became commercially impossible to keep apart. Three things made that happen:

There is no first rock record. "Rocket 88" from 1951 is often named, but it has a shuffle rather than straight eighths, and dozens of records from the 1940s have equal claims. Genres get recognized afterwards, usually by critics and marketers who need a sales category.

The Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show on 9 February 1964, and on 4 April 1964 they held the entire top five of the Hot 100. The interesting part is the detour: British teenagers heard American rhythm and blues on import records without the American racial split, learned it secondhand, and their distortions became the style. Two effects lasted: the band as a self-writing unit broke the Tin Pan Alley division of labor, and album sales took off. See rock and folk.

Soul is gospel singing applied to worldly subjects over a rhythm and blues section. Berry Gordy founded Tamla Records on 12 January 1959 with eight hundred dollars borrowed from a family savings pot, and incorporated Motown on 14 April 1960. He had worked a Ford assembly line and built the label the same way: a house band, fixed writing teams, a studio running up to 22 hours a day. Between 1960 and 1969, 79 Motown songs reached the top ten. Stax in Memphis was the contrast: looser, a mixed house band, and a way of recording closer to playing live. See soul and R&B.

Until the mid 1960s an album was mostly two hits plus filler. Multitrack recording changed that: a record could be built in layers, so the studio became an instrument and a production could contain things nobody could play live. One LP side held about twenty minutes and the whole record around forty, which is enough room for coherence and drama. Albums also carried a higher margin, so labels granted more studio time because it paid. The concept record, the sleeve as artwork and album criticism all come from here.

Disco came out of soul and funk, and what decided its shape was the room it was made for: a dance floor with a dj programming the whole night. That needed the twelve-inch single, developed in the 1970s, which gave room for long versions and a louder, fuller sound. The dj became an author and the remix became a form, a line that runs straight into house and techno. See funk and disco.

Punk reacted to the same establishment with the opposite means: short songs, few chords, little studio, small labels, pressing and distributing yourself. That last part is the lasting legacy, because it normalized making a record without a major label. Both happened in the same years, which is a reminder that chronology is rarely a tidy relay.

On 11 August 1973, Clive Campbell, DJ Kool Herc, and his sister Cindy ran a party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. That date gets called the birth of hip-hop, which is convenient more than true, but there is a real invention in it. Herc noticed that dancers responded to the break, the short stretch where the vocal drops out and only the rhythm section is left, and with two turntables and two copies of the same record he could repeat it indefinitely. Existing recordings became raw material and the dj composed by editing.

"Rapper's Delight" followed on 16 September 1979, built on the bassline of Chic's "Good Times" and with lyrics largely taken from Grandmaster Caz. It put both core questions of the genre on the table at once: what belongs to whom, and what is authorship when you work with existing material. See sampling.

MTV went on air on 1 August 1981, and within a few years a video was a condition for exposure. That had musical consequences: songs had to be visually translatable, productions got tighter to work on a television speaker, and structures got more predictable, because a clip needs a chorus at fixed moments.

Spotify started in Sweden on 7 October 2008. In 2024 streaming was 84 percent of US recorded music revenue, 14.9 billion dollars out of 17.7 billion. Vinyl was 1.4 billion that year. What that does to the music is specific:

The same order appears at every turning point. A new carrier arrives with its own limit and its own reward, musicians adapt without noticing, and the shape that results passes for the natural shape of music until the next carrier arrives. Sheet music standardized the song at 32 bars, the 78 made it three minutes, the LP made the album a work, the turntable made existing records into raw material, and streaming made the first thirty seconds decisive.