What is Popular Music?

Popular music is a wide range of things, it can be music that is popular in its own genre of music, this meaning an artist or a band in a specific genre is popular. Popular music can also be a genre of music, which is popular compared to all other genres of music. The general ideology is that popular music is music that is listened to by the masses of people either nationally or internationally. According to Roy Shuker in Understanding Popular Music, popular music ‘consists of a hybrid of musical traditions, styles, and influences, and is also an economic product which is invested with ideological significance by many of its consumers’ p.7. This suggesting that popular music is a wide mixture of history, culture and politics all put together to make music, which is accessible and approachable to the masses rather than the minorities to be constituted as popular.