Key facts
- Other names
- Beautiful music middle of the road traditional pop
- Stylistic origins
- Light music big band
- Cultural origins
- 1940s, United States
- Derivative forms
- Chill-out music sunshine pop adult contemporary music space music ambient music lounge music lofi hip-hop
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- music genre
- Subclass of
- popular music
- Country of origin
- United States
- Image
- Easy listening CD section, First floor, HMV, the Core, Leeds (14th January 2020).jpg
Show 4 more facts
- topic's main category
- Category:Easy listening music
- Commons category
- Easy listening music
- inception
- 1948-01-01
- on focus list of Wikimedia project
- Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/4
Sources (3)
via Wikidata · CC0
~5 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Easy listening (including mood music) is a popular music genre and radio format that was most popular during the 1950s to the 1970s. It is related to middle of the road (MOR) music and encompasses instrumental recordings of standards, hit songs, non-rock vocals and instrumental covers of selected popular rock songs. It mostly concentrates on music that pre-dates the rock and roll era, characteristically on music from the 1940s and 1950s. It was differentiated from the mostly instrumental beautiful music format by its variety of styles, including a percentage of vocals, arrangements and tempos to fit various parts of the broadcast day.
Easy listening music is often confused with lounge music, but while it was popular in some of the same venues it was meant to be listened to for enjoyment rather than as background sound.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “easy listening” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.