Looking for some pop music facts? We’ve got you covered better than a cover song (a cover song is when a new recording of a popular song is “covered” by a musician who didn’t sing the original song – that’s another pop music fact for you before we even get started!)
Read on for our top fun facts about pop music.
- Pop music became popular in the 1950s when rock and roll became a ‘popular’ hit with teenagers.
- Today there are hundreds of different types of pop music, also known as ‘genres,’ including K-pop (Korean pop), hip-hop, electric dance music (EDM), and rock music.
- Elvis Presley was a rock and roll musician and one of the first worldwide pop music stars we know today.
- The Beatles were one of the first “boy bands” in pop music; bands such as Take That, One Direction, JLS, and many more have them to thank!
- The Beatles are behind so many exciting pop music facts – for example, they were so popular that on their tour of America in the 1960s, they were followed by crowds of screaming teenage girls! These young girls would get so worked up that the media coined a term for it – they called it “Beatlemania.”
- Paul McCartney was in The Beatles and still performs today – he is the world’s richest pop star with a fortune of over $1 billion!
- The most popular music in the 1970s was disco, and one of the top pop groups of this decade was the Swedish pop group ABBA. An extra pop music fact about ABBA – they rose to fame after performing on the Eurovision TV contest with their hit “Waterloo.”
- The UK’s best-selling single was Elton John’s ‘Something About the Way You Look Tonight/Candle in the Wind 1997′. It sold nearly 5 million copies when it was released following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997.
- In the UK, 178 songs have sold over 1 million copies.
- For recent facts about pop music, who were some of the best-selling pop artists of 2021? They were Adele, Ed Sheeran, Olivia Rodrigo, Dua Lipa, and some older bands such as Queen and ABBA (yes, the same ABBA from the 1970s!).
