Pop Genre Research

Pop Genre comes from the term popular, it is usually understood to be commercially recorded music, often oriented towards a youth market, usually consisting of relatively short, simple love songs.

This is taken from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop_music

"Musicologists often identify the following characteristics as typical of the pop music genre:
an aim of appealing to a general audience, rather than to a particular sub-culture or ideology
an emphasis on craftsmanship rather than formal "artistic" qualities
an emphasis on recording, production, and technology, over live performance
a tendency to reflect existing trends rather than progressive developments
much pop music is intended to encourage dancing, or it uses dance-oriented beats or rhythms
The main medium of pop music is the song, often between two and a half and three and a half minutes in length, generally marked by a consistent and noticeable rhythmic element, a mainstream style and a simple traditional structure. Common variants include the verse-chorus form and the thirty-two-bar form, with a focus on melodies and catchy hooks, and a chorus that contrasts melodically, rhythmically and harmonically with the verse. The beat and the melodies tend to be simple, with limited harmonic accompaniment. The lyrics of modern pop songs typically focus on simple themes – often love and romantic relationships – although there are notable exceptions.
Harmony in pop music is often "that of classical European tonality, only more simple-minded." Clichés include the barbershop harmony (i.e. moving from a secondary dominant harmony to a dominant harmony, and then to the tonic) and blues scale-influenced harmony. "The influence of the circle-of-fifths paradigm has declined since the mid-1950s. The harmonic languages of rock and soul have moved away from the all-encompassing influence of the dominant function. ...There are other tendencies (perhaps also traceable to the use of a guitar as a composing instrument) – pedal- point harmonies, root motion by diatonic step, modal harmonic and melodic organization – that point away from functional tonality and toward a tonal sense that is less directional, more free-floating."

On the right hand side there is a photograph of Madonna who is known as the 'Queen of Pop' and Michael Jackson whos the 'King of Pop'.

Pop Genre Secondary Research

The Secondary Sources represent the pop genre which are from search engines such as Google and Tumblr and OK magazine. The image in top left hand side shows a person dancing this portrays the fast and catchy rhythem of pop music which enables the audience to relate the song to dance, as pop music is played at weddings and parties. Most of the pictures are bright and colourful which represents the pop genre as the artists usually sing upbeat songs. Emotions of happiness and love is portrayed in the pop genre as many pop icons are females for example, Madonna, Lady GaGa and Katy Perry who sing about love like Madonna- Papa don't preach which tells the story of a young girl in love but the father dissaproves of the boyfriend. Pop artists usually spend a lot of money on the music videos to make them memorable like Michael Jackson Thriller which is often considered the best music video due to the dancing, theatre production and the comparison of the lyrics to the video "No one's about to save you from the beast of the night" the video shows zombies attacking a couple. Pop is known for the big stage productions and creating fashion trends such as Lady GaGa and her recently contraversal meat dress which she had worn at the VMA's and Madonna's outfits which she worn during the 80s for videos 'Like a Virgin'. Many pop artists such as Britney Spears and Katy Perry appear in a lot of gossip magazines like OK magazine which gains the artist publicity. Ideally, when we create a music video we would love a big budget to have a massive production and costume design though realistically we would have to make do with what we have. Pop music is a very mainstream genre as it is played on the radio and MTV a lot and many people who listen to pop would shop at high street shops like River Island. Many pop artists collaborate on songs such as Lady GaGa and Beyonce- Telephone, Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson- Scream and Gwen Stefani and Akon- Sweet Escape which enables the artist to get more radio play as the song may be more popular.
Dom Media