Urban contemporary in the context of "Savannah, Georgia"

Pop music, or simply pop, 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.

Identifying factors of pop music usually include repeated choruses and hooks, short to medium-length songs written in a basic format (often the verse–chorus structure), and rhythms or tempos that can be easily danced to. Much of pop music also borrows elements from other styles such as rock, hip hop, urban, dance, Latin, and country.

Contemporary hit radio (CHR, also known as contemporary hits, hit list, current hits, hit music, top 40, or pop radio) is a radio format common in many countries that focuses on playing current and recurrent popular music as determined by the Top 40 music charts. There are several subcategories, dominantly focusing on rock, pop, or urban music. Used alone, CHR most often refers to the CHR-pop format. The term contemporary hit radio was coined in the early 1980s by Radio & Records magazine to designate Top 40 stations which continued to play hits from all musical genres as pop music splintered into adult contemporary, urban contemporary, contemporary Christian and other formats.

The term "top 40" is also used to refer to the actual list of hit songs, and, by extension, to refer to pop music in general. The term has also been modified to describe top 50; top 30; top 20; top 10; hot 100 (each with its number of songs) and hot hits radio formats, but carrying more or less the same meaning and having the same creative point of origin with Todd Storz as further refined by Gordon McLendon as well as Bill Drake. The format became especially popular in the mid-sixties as radio stations constrained disc jockeys to numbered play lists in the wake of the payola scandal.

Popular music in the 1990s saw the continuation of teen pop and dance-pop trends which had emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. Furthermore, hip hop grew and continued to be highly successful in the decade, with the continuation of the genre's golden age. Aside from rap, reggae, contemporary R&B, and urban music in general remained popular throughout the decade; urban music in the late-1980s and 1990s often blended with styles such as soul, funk, and jazz, resulting in fusion genres such as new jack swing, neo-soul, hip hop soul, and g-funk which were popular.

Similarly to the 1980s, rock music was also very popular in the 1990s, yet, unlike the new wave and glam metal-dominated scene of the time, grunge, Britpop, industrial rock, and other alternative rock music emerged and took over as the most popular of the decade, as well as punk rock, ska punk, and nu metal, amongst others, which attained a high level of success at various points throughout the years.

The rich and varied music of Sudan has traditional, rural, northeastern African roots and also shows Arabic, Western or other African influences, especially on the popular urban music from the early 20th century onwards. Since the establishment of big cities like Khartoum as melting pots for people of diverse backgrounds, their cultural heritage and tastes have shaped numerous forms of modern popular music. In the globalized world of today, the creation and consumption of music through satellite TV or on the Internet is a driving force for cultural change in Sudan, popular with local audiences as well as with Sudanese living abroad.

Even after the secession of South Sudan in 2011, the Sudan of today is very diverse, with five hundred plus ethnic groups spread across the territory of what is the third largest country in Africa. The cultures of its ethnic and social groups have been marked by a complex cultural legacy, going back to the spread of Islam, the regional history of the slave trade and by indigenous African and Arab cultural heritage. Though some of the ethnic groups still maintain their own African language, most Sudanese today use the distinct Sudanese version of Arabic.

The music of Iraq or Iraqi music, (Arabic: موسيقى عراقية), [Romanised: mūsīqā ʿirāqiyya], also known as the music of Mesopotamia, encompasses the music of a number of ethnic groups and genres. Ethnically, it includes Mesopotamian Arabic, Assyrian, Kurdish and the music of Turkmen, among others. Apart from the traditional music of these peoples, Iraqi music includes contemporary music styles such as pop, rock, soul and urban contemporary. Instruments used include the oud, Iraqi santur and rebab.