The evolution of popular music through the decades

The evolution of popular music through the decades

The evolution of popular music through the decades brought with it changes in cultural context, most of which were inevitable mainly due to the increase in technology and the acceptance of changing times. Music was being published, and inventions like the jukebox as well as radio stations made music to be listened over a wide range of geographical space. Also, music publishing brought with it a wide range of ways to economic prosperity. In the 1930s, radio brought with it the generation of royalty income by music that was played. Artists, together with firms such as the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers’ (ASCAP’s), collected a lot of revenue from such. As Garofalo and Waksman explain “radio revenues were clearly substantial, and their potential at the start of the 1940s

was even greater” (60). The revenues collected made music monetization possible, and it changed the onset of popular music culturally. Additionally, genres of music, including country music and blues, could now achieve a lot of airplay through such channels.

Due to the new restructuring of popular music to a more economic angle, some people felt that popular music primarily rock ‘n’ roll did not value the civil rights struggle, and its direction was more commercial. The main reason was that rock ‘n’ roll in the 50s ventured past “the lines of class, race, and age” (Garofalo and Waksman, 148). Thus its motives seemed contrasting to the objectives of those who were pushing for the civil rights movement. The demonstrations were against the unfair treatment of people of color, and definitely, the new evolution of pop music in rock ‘n’ roll was not helping in the movement. Previous genres, such as spirituals, assisted in the civil movement, but the new turn of events was more general and economical and did not help much in the movement. Therefore, despite the progress in popular music and the mass culture critique that was involved in its growth, its was felt differently in various spheres.