Pop music (a term that originally derives from an abbreviation of "popular") is usually understood to be commercially recorded music, often oriented towards a youth market, usually consisting of relatively short and simple love songs and utilizing technological innovations to produce new variations on existing themes. Pop music has absorbed influences from most other forms of popular music, but as a genre is particularly associated with the rock and roll and later rock style.
The term "pop song," is first recorded as being used in 1926 in the sense of a piece of music "having popular appeal". According to Grove Music Online, the term "pop music" "originated in Britain in the mid-1950s as a description for Rock and roll and the new youth music styles that it influenced..." The Oxford Dictionary of Music states that while pop's "[e]arlier meaning meant concerts appealing to a wide audience...[,] [s]ince the late 1950s, however, pop has had the special meaning of non‐classical mus[ic], usually in the form of songs, performed by such artists as the Beatles, The Rolling Stone, ABBA, etc."
Hatch and Millward define pop music as "a body of music which is distinguishable from popular, jazz and folk musics" and they state that the "birth of the pop music industry" was with the "discovery of Jimmie Rodgers in 1927". Hatch and Millward claim that pop music is distinguished from other popular music, such as Hollywood soundtrack music or Tin Pan Alleymusic in that pop music relies on an "aural tradition" (learning "by ear" from records or other musicians), whereas other popular music forms were transmitted via sheet music.
Grove Music Online also states that "...in the early 1960s [the term] ‘pop music’ competed terminologically with Beat Music [in England], while in the USA its coverage overlapped (as it still does) with that of ‘rock and roll’." Chambers' Dictionary mentions the contemporary usage of the term "pop art"; Grove Music Online states that the "term pop music...seems to have been a spin-off from the terms pop art and pop culture, coined slightly earlier, and referring to a whole range of new, often American, media-culture products".
From about 1967 the term was increasingly used in opposition to the term rock music, a division that gave generic significance to both terms. Whereas rock aspired to authenticity and an expansion of the possibilities of popular music, pop was more commercial, ephemeral and accessible. According to Simon Frith pop music is produced "as a matter of enterprise not art", is "designed to appeal to everyone" and "doesn't come from any particular place or mark off any particular taste." It is "not driven by any significant ambition except profit and commercial reward...and, in musical terms, it is essentially conservative." It is "provided from on high (by record companies, radio programmers and concert promoters) rather than being made from below...Pop is not a do-it-yourself music but is professionally produced and packaged."
Although pop music is often seen as oriented towards the singles charts, as a genre it is not the sum of all chart music, which has always contained songs from a variety of sources, including classical, jazz, rock, and novelty songs, while pop music as a genre is usually seen as existing and developing separately. Thus "pop music" may be used to describe a distinct genre, aimed at a youth market, often characterized as a softer alternative to rock and roll.
