Since the 1990's, there has been a proliferation of survey research, theoretical material, and ethnographic work concerned with the production and consumption of popular music and particularly its reception in society.
Thomas Edison invented sound recording in 1877 in the United States; as a result, the era of recorded music began. The emergence of many popular music genres during the twentieth century can be linked to technological advancements of the same period. The rise of recorded music together with more stringent copyright protection laws facilitated the development of the music business in capitalist society and more specifically the centralization of the American music publishing business and songwriters in an area of New York known as Tin Pan Alley in the late-nineteenth century. The Tin Pan Alley era initially specialized in ballads and novelty songs but later began to incorporate popular styles of the period, including ragtime, jazz, and blues. Significant technological innovations such as the widespread use of radio, the increasing quality and affordability of the gramophone, the introduction of the microphone in the 1920's, and the inception of amplification and electric recording paved the way for new musical styles to emerge, such as rhythm and blues and rock and roll, leading to a surge in popularity of record buying, particularly in Britain and America but also on a global scale.
Theodor Adorno, a critical theorist and leading member of the Frankfurt school in Germany, coined the term culture industry in his critique of mass culture that made specific reference to popular music. The majority of Adorno's account is based on his views of popular music produced in the Tin Pan Alley era and jazz standards of the 1920's and 1930's. For Adorno, popular music is standardized, repetitive, and unequivocally contrasts with "serious" music:.
A clear judgment concerning the relation of serious to popular music can be arrived at only by strict attention to the fundamental characteristic of popular music: standardization.
