Wikipedia

Easy listening

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Easy listening music is a style of popular music and radio format that emerged in the mid-20th century.[citation needed] It features simple, catchy melodies, soft, laid-back songs and occasionally rhythms suitable for dancing. Easy listening music is mostly instrumental (often played on light of tone instruments such as the Hammond Organ, "lush strings," or Ukulele). Some singers, such as Andy Williams, Jack Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck and Eydie Gorme, have vocal styles that are highly compatible with this style. Much of the work of some other pop vocalists, such as Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Tom Jones and Mel Tormé were considered too frenetic or swing-oriented to be played in an easy listening radio format.[citation needed]

Circa 1980, easy listening was the most listened-to radio format in America.[citation needed] However, the easy-listening format gradually declined and became scarce, not because its listeners were too few, but because they were getting too old and therefore less desirable for radio advertisers.[citation needed]

Beautiful music is a subset of easy listening music, since, as a radio format, it had rigid standards for instrumentation (e.g., few or no saxophones) and restrictions on how many vocal pieces could be played in an hour.[citation needed] It is sometimes called Nostalgia music.[citation needed]

The term "easy listening" has sometimes been applied negatively in the years since it went out of fashion. It is similar to what is called "lounge" or "lounge core", but lounge music is much more jazz-oriented and dependent on musical improvisation than easy listening. [citation needed] Easy listening music is almost always orchestrated and is more analogous to classical music than to jazz.

Since easy-listening music is rather unknown to the younger generations, the term "easy listening" is often incorrectly used when applied to soft pop, Smooth Jazz, or new age music.[citation needed] Easy listening music is also, sometimes, known as "mood music" or "MOR",[citation needed] or more pejoratively as "Muzak" or "elevator music".

Adult contemporary music is a more fashionable form of easy listening and is one of the top radio formats in the USA today.[citation needed] Easy listening is erroneously referred to as instrumental elevator music by some.[citation needed]

Artists and music

  • Trumpeters with high deployment in easy listening

Radio stations playing easy listening music

Template:Easy Listening Radio stations

Malaysia's Easy Listening Radio station link LiteFM

See also

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