Pop
Pop is not a sound, it is a set of priorities: the chorus arrives soon, the hook is short, and nothing is allowed to take time the chorus could have had. The harmony is functional and not classical, which corpus research makes unusually clear.
- IV beats V
- backbeat
- chorus first
In which styles
- Pop
- Stadium pop
- Singer-songwriter crossover
In short
Pop harmony is functional but not textbook. Corpus work on a hundred influential rock and pop songs found something that contradicts a good deal of theory teaching: after the tonic, IV is the most used chord, not V. Plagal motion from IV to I turns up far more often in this repertoire than the classical account predicts.
Immediate. A pop song is built so that a listener who has never heard it can predict where it goes by the second chorus, and that predictability is a feature rather than a failure of imagination.
How the style works
The groove is the backbeat: accents on two and four, usually snare or claps. Counting one two three four, the emphasis lands on the beats that are naturally weakest, and that inversion is what gives the music its forward push and makes it physical.
Where you run into this
- A chorus that arrives within the first minute
- A four-chord loop that carries an entire song
- A melody that stays inside a small range so anyone can sing it
What you leave out
Long solos, because a three-minute song has no room. Harmonic surprises for their own sake. Intros that delay the voice: measured across American top ten singles between 1986 and 2015, the instrumental intro shrank from over twenty seconds to around five.