Studies of popular music encompass a range of approaches from musicological, whereby music is commonly analyzed as a text, to sociological, which tends to focus on the social uses of popular music and the dynamic and interactive relationship between popular music, culture, and society. Popular music is commonly understood as being intrinsically linked to popular culture. Sociological studies of popular music audiences tend to use either questionnaire-based survey methods; ethnographic approaches, such as participant observation and in-depth interviewing; or a combination of the two. .
Through survey research, tastes in popular music are understood as being shaped by a person's gender, age, social class background, and race/ethnicity.
To a certain extent, sociological approaches to studying popular music stem from cultural studies, an offshoot of sociology developed primarily in the 1970's at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in Birmingham, England, led by Richard Hoggart and later Stuart Hall. A number of notable popular music theorists worked at the CCCS, including Dick Hebdige, Iain Chambers, Angela McRobbie, and Paul Willis. A major focus of the CCCS was the study of youth culture and subcultural analysis; subsequently, popular music was perceived as central to adolescent resistance, understood as key to the development of sociology of youth, and viewed as a crucial realm of youth consumption practices and identification. Thus, popular music research since the 1970's has tended to focus on teenagers and groups of youths that coalesce around particular music styles.
Few academic studies of popular music existed pre-1970, and the subject received relatively little scholarly attention during the 1970's and 1980's, with the exception of aforementioned theorists that worked at institutions such as the CCCS and key theorists such as Lawrence Grossberg in the United States and Simon Frith in the United Kingdom.
