Influences and development

Throughout its development, pop music has absorbed influences from most other genres of popular music. Early pop music drew on the sentimental ballad for its form, gained its use of vocal harmonies from gospel and soul music, instrumentation from jazz and rock music, orchestration from classical music, tempo from dance music, backing from electronic music and has recently appropriated spoken passages from rap.

It has also made use of technological innovation. In the 1940s, the development of inexpensive 45 r.p.m. records for singles " revolutionized the manner in which pop has been disseminated" and helped to move pop music to ‘to a record/radio/film star system’. The 45s were much more durable than the fragile 78 r.p.m. records, which meant that 45s could be "distributed far more easily". This led to a "market led by pop singles". As well, 45 rpm records were cheaper to produce. Another technological change was the widespread availability of television in the 1950s; with televised performances, "pop stars had to have a visual presence ". In the 1960s, the introduction of inexpensive, portable transistor radios meant that teenagers could listen to music outside of the home. By the early 1980s, the "promotion of pop music had been greatly affected by the rise of Music Television (MTV)", which "favoured those artists such as Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Prince who had a strong visual appeal".

Other technological innovations that affected pop music were the widespread use of the microphone (in the 1940s) –which allowed a more intimate singing style: multi-track recording (in the 1960s) and digital sampling as methods for the creation and elaboration of pop music. Pop music was also communicated largely through the mass media, including radio, film, TV and, particularly since the 1980s, video.

Pop music has been dominated by the American (and from the mid-1960s British) music industries, whose influence has made pop music something of an international monoculture, but most regions and countries have their own form of pop music, sometimes producing local versions of wider trends, and lending them local characteristics. Some of these trends (for example Europop) have had a significant impact of the development of the genre.

According to Grove Music Online, "Western-derived pop styles, whether coexisting with or marginalizing distinctively local genres, have spread throughout the world and have come to constitute stylistic common denominators in global commercial music cultures". Some non-Western countries, such as Japan, have developed a thriving pop music industry. The "output of the Japanese record industry, most of which is devoted to Western-style pop, for several years has surpassed in quantity that of every nation except the USA". The "spread of Western-style pop music has been interpreted variously as representing Americanization, homogenization, modernization, creative appropriation, cultural imperialism, and/or a more general process of globalization".