Popular Music is easily definable as music that is popular. Although this category is generally saved for music that hits the Top 40 charts of its time, it can apply to any genre with a following. Society understands this term as chart music and may be met with some confusion when the claim ‘jazz is popular music’ is made. Musicologist Philip Tagg defined popular music with the following statement:

‘Popular music, unlike art music, is conceived for mass distribution to large and often socioculturally heterogeneous groups of listeners, stored and distributed in non-written form, only possible in an industrial monetary economy where it becomes a commodity and in capitalist societies, subject to the laws of ‘free’ enterprise, according to which it should ideally sell as much as possible of as little as possible to as many as possible’

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