Modern popular songs are typically distributed as recordings, and are played on the radio, though all other mass media that have audio capabilities are involved. Their relative popularity is inferred from commercially significant sales of recordings, ratings of stations and networks that play them, and ticket sales for concerts by the recording artists. A popular song can become a modern folk song when members of the public who learn to sing it from the recorded version teach their version to others. Popular songs may be called pop songs for short, although pop songs or pop music may instead be considered a more commercially popular genre of popular music as a whole.
Many people consider songs in popular music to have in general simpler structures than art songs, however, musicologists who are, “both contemptuous and condescending [of popular music] are looking for types of production, musical form, and listening which they associate with a different kind of music...’classical music’...and [thus] they generally find popular music lacking”.
