First we must consider what is popular music and what is art. Popular music came to mean those songs associated with the mass market around the 1930’s and 1940’s. Whether art can be defined has been a matter of controversy, although I believe it is an expression and creation of works of beauty.
Due to technological advances in the early part of the twentieth century music was able to be mass-produced, due to this, the originality and high standards of music were sacrificed in favour of cheap merchandise and high profits, moving music from being an art form to a mass-produced commodity. Theodor Adorno said, “The popular music industry is an all consuming production line that churns out mass produced, inferior commodities.” Pop music now, has not invented anything new, it has just borrowed rhythms from other forms of music, and this is for the benefit of mass production and profits, not for the love of making music.
Your definition of popular music as "those songs associated with the mass market around the 1930’s and 1940’s" is a strange and rather narrow one. Also your insistence that technological advance = mass produced music is far from a proven equation (see Gendron particularly).
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