Music journalism is media criticism and reporting about music topics, including popular music, classical music, and traditional music. Journalists began writing about music in the eighteenth century, providing commentary on what is now regarded as classical music. In the 1960s, music journalism began more prominently covering popular music like rock and pop after the breakthrough of The Beatles. With the rise of the internet in the 2000s, music criticism developed an increasingly large online presence with music bloggers, aspiring music critics, and established critics supplementing print media online. Music journalism today includes reviews of songs, albums and live concerts, profiles of recording artists, and reporting of artist news and music events.
Music journalists (from left to right) Robert Christgau and Ann Powers and musicology professor Charles Kronengolm at the 2007 Pop Conference at Seattle's Experience Music Project
Hector Berlioz, active as a music journalist in Paris in the 1830s and 1840s
Richard Goldstein (pictured at the 2015 EMP Pop Conference) was the first American music critic to focus on rock music.
American pop music critic Ann Powers
Pop music is a genre of popular music that originated in its modern form during the mid-1950s in the United States and the United Kingdom. During the 1950s and 1960s, pop music encompassed rock and roll and the youth-oriented styles it influenced. Rock and pop music remained roughly synonymous until the late 1960s, after which pop became associated with music that was more commercial, ephemeral, and accessible.
The Oxford Dictionary of Music states that the term "pop" refers to music performed by such artists as the Rolling Stones (pictured here in a 2006 performance).
Amr Diab, Egyptian pop star, named "El-Hadaba", for achieving high records sales in the Middle East and Africa for the last three decades
Bing Crosby was one of the first artists to be nicknamed "King of Pop" or "King of Popular Music".[verification needed]
The 1960s British Invasion marked a period when the US charts were inundated with British acts such as the Beatles (pictured 1964).