Verse (popular music) in the context of "Thirty-two-bar form"

Popular music is music with wide appeal that is typically distributed to large audiences through the music industry. These forms and styles can be enjoyed and performed by people with little or no musical training. As a kind of popular art, it stands in contrast to art music. Art music was historically disseminated through the performances of written music, although since the beginning of the recording industry, it is also disseminated through recordings. Traditional music forms such as early blues songs or hymns were passed along orally, or to smaller, local audiences.

The original application of the term is to music of the 1880s Tin Pan Alley period in the United States. Although popular music sometimes is known as "pop music", the two terms are not interchangeable. Popular music is a generic term for a wide variety of genres of music that appeal to the tastes of a large segment of the population, whereas pop music usually refers to a specific musical genre within popular music. Popular music songs and pieces typically have easily singable melodies. The song structure of popular music commonly involves repetition of sections, with the verse and chorus or refrain repeating throughout the song and the bridge providing a contrasting and transitional section within a piece. From the 1960s through the mid-2000s, albums collecting songs were the dominant form for recording and consuming English-language popular music, in a period known as the album era.

A refrain (from Vulgar Latin: refringere, "to repeat", through Old French: refraindre) is the line or lines that are repeated in poetry or in music—the "chorus" of a song. Poetic fixed forms that feature refrains include the villanelle, the virelay, and the sestina.

In popular music, the refrain or chorus may contrast with the verse melodically, rhythmically, and harmonically; it may assume a higher level of dynamics and activity, often with added instrumentation. Chorus form, or strophic form, is a sectional and/or additive way of structuring a piece of music based on the repetition of one formal section or block played