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 andharmonically 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.
