This is a list of the commercially relevant genres in modern popular music. Styles that are not contemporary or commercially marketed in substantial numbers have been excluded, in accordance with the following criteria:
- Art music: classical music and opera. However Art Music, with the exception of opera, is not usually classified as popular music but as Western Art Music instead.
- Music written for the score of a play, musicals, operetta, zarzuela, film or similar: Filmi, incidental music, video game music, music hall songs and showtunes.
- Ballroom music: tango, pasodoble, cha cha cha and others.
- Religious music: gospel, Gregorian chant, spirituals, hymns and the like.
- Military music, marches, national anthems and related compositions.
- Regional and national musics with no significant commercial impact abroad, except when a version of an international genre: Traditional music, folk, oral traditions, sea shanties, work songs, nursery rhymes, Arabesque, Chalga, Flamenco and indigenous music.
Applicable styles are classified in this list using Allmusic genre categorisation.
Famous quotes containing the words list of, list, popular and/or music:
“Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“I made a list of things I have
to remember and a list
of things I want to forget,
but I see they are the same list.”
—Linda Pastan (b. 1932)
“The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races.... The economics of this musical esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“If I could believe the Quakers banned music because church music is so damn bad, I should view them with approval.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)