British popular music and popular music in general, can be defined in a number of ways, but is used here to describe music which is not part of the art/classical music or Church music traditions, including folk music, jazz, pop and rock music. These forms of music have particularly flourished in Britain, which, it has been argued, has influenced popular music disproportionately to its size, partly due to its linguistic and cultural links with many countries, particularly the former areas of British control such as United States, Canada, and Australia, but also a capacity for invention, innovation and fusion, which has led to the development of, or participation in, many of the major trends in popular music. This is particularly true since the early 1960s when the British Invasion led by The Beatles, helped to secure British performers a major place in development of pop and rock music, which has been revisited at various times, with genres originating in or being radically developed by British musicians, including: blues rock, heavy metal music, progressive rock, punk rock, British folk rock, folk punk, acid jazz, drum and bass, grime, afroswing, dubstep and Britpop.
Early British popular music
Commercial music enjoyed by the people can be seen to originate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the arrival of the broadside ballad, which were sold cheaply and in great numbers until the nineteenth century. Further technological, economic and social changes led to new forms of music in the nineteenth century, including the brass band, which produced a popular and communal form of classical music. Similarly, the music hall sprang up to cater for the entertainment of new urban societies, adapting existing forms of music to produce popular songs and acts. In the 1930s the influence of US jazz led to the creation of British dance bands, who provided a social and popular music that began to dominate social occasions and the radio airwaves.
1950s
By 1950, indigenous forms of British popular music were already giving way to the influence of American forms of music including jazz, swing and traditional pop, mediated through film and records. The significant change of the mid-1950s was the impact of US rock and roll, which provided a new model for performance and recording, based on a youth market. Initially this was dominated by US acts, or re-creations of American forms of music, but soon distinctly British forms began to appear, first in the uniquely British take on US folk music in the Skiffle craze of the 1950s, in the beginnings of a folk revival that came to place an emphasis on national traditions and then in early attempts to produce British rock and roll. However it's important to note that American folk music itself has its root in British and Irish folk music, and so was seen as more of a shared cultural tradition than a new form of music. Indeed, many of the later American genres such as Blues and Rock & Roll share origins with earlier Folk and popular music that merged with predominantly African American forms of music to create what would become the aforementioned genres. A key feature in much American music being the Scotch Snap for example. This evidences a common theme of cyclical exportation and re-exportation of British and American music between the respective cultures.
1960s
By the early 1960s the British had developed a viable national music industry and began to produce adapted forms of American music in beat music and British blues which would be re-exported to America by bands such as The Beatles and Rolling Stones. This helped to make the dominant forms of popular music something of a shared Anglo-American project. The development of British blues rock helped revitalised rock music and led to the growing distinction between pop and rock music. In the mid-1960s, British bands were at the forefront in the creation of the hard rock genre. While pop music continued to dominate the singles charts, teen culture continued to dominate. Rock began to develop into diverse and creative subgenres that characterised the form throughout the rest of the twentieth century.