ABSTRACT
In the past 40 years the phrase 'pop music' has come to refer to a particular branch of popular music. Although pop music might be regarded as a relatively recent phenomenon, few elements have remained constant during its short history. With the development of the compact cassette and the CD, record companies started releasing versions of these formats as singles for pop music, and this principle continues to the present day. Like many other kinds of modern popular music, pop is technologically mediated but, unlike these, it consistently tends to adopt recorded formats that do not fully exploit the technological resources available. The simplicity of much pop music is evident musically and lyrically. Repetition is also a vitally important characteristic of pop music. In pop music, the fact that few songs are through-composed tends to give a prominent role to repetition of musical material.
