ABSTRACT
Popular music is the background noise of our everyday lives. “Popular music” has been defined as the “music that people value the most” (Blacking in Fujie 1989: 197) or music that is “accessible to a broader range of people,” most often through the mass media (Wade 2005: 45). The English word “popular” arises from the concept of “people”; to be truly “popular,” it cannot be exclusive; it stands for and comes from “an aggregation structured of multiple [types] of people” (Yamada 2003: 4). Popular music must be accessible, with no special training required to facilitate its appreciation and consumption. Economic class and social status will always have a part in defining audiences, but ideally popular music transcends many of these boundaries. Its existence is dependent on its integration with the mass media, which are explicitly aimed at a cross-class, multilayered public audience.
