This catch-all category tentatively includes the most innovative and influential band in the history of popular music, The Beatles, although in truth their music spans every style from pure rock & roll through pop to progressive and avant-garde rock. It does however encompass everything that came in their wake not included in vocal pop or the other categories of modern rock
The Beatles emerged from the early British rock scene to dominate popular music throughout the 1960's. They spawned a host of bands which collectively made up the so-called Mersey Sound - The Merseybeats, The Swinging Blue Jeans, The Fourmost, Gerry & The Pacemakers etc., who for a while rivalled the watered down rock & roll of Cliff Richard & The Shadows.
Countless bands based more or less on Beatles format were to follow - The Hollies, Cliff Bennett & The Rebel Rousers, The Dave Clark Five, The Zombies, Herman's Hermits, The Troggs, Badfinger etc., but it was the idiosyncratic producer Joe Meek who came up with some of the most innovative developments of the era, applying the experimental zeal of 1950's classical avant-garde to pop production. His trademark spacy sound epitomised by The Tornados' international hit "Telstar" in 1962 was brand new, and places Meek in almost the same bracket as pioneer American record producer Phil Spector.
After the break-up of The Beatles in 1970 the pop scene was gradually taken over by the glam rockers ( T.Rex, Slade, Sweet, Mud, Suzi Quatro, Gary Glitter, Alvin Stardust etc. ) in a triumph of style over substance. They were challenged for supremacy only by an increasingly ostentatious Elton John and disco-meisters The Bee Gees.
In the 1980's the centre ground of British pop was partially taken over by the new wave bands of the dance culture. The rest of the scene was dominated by the good-time pop of Wham and the polished sounds of Simply Red, The Pet Shop Boys, Phil Collins, The Eurythmics, Dire Straits, Sade etc. Kate Bush's unique voice and songwriting style provided one of the few high points of a fairly nondescript decade.
The 1990's saw the rise of the boy & girl song and dance groups aimed directly at the teen market. Although the major players - Take That and The Spice Girls were conceived as Britain's answer to New Kids On The Block and Madonna, dance-pop grew out of 1970's disco, and teen pop goes even further back via The Bay City Rollers, and The Osmonds to The Monkees and, dare I say it, The Beatles ( although in their case it was an inadvertent consequence of their wider appeal rather than part of a marketing strategy ). The growth of the style also owes much to the phenomenal success of ABBA in the 1970's, although the industry seemed not to realise that much of that success was based on high quality songwriting.
Since the late 1990's dance-pop groups have declined in favour of the "pop lolita" exemplified by Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera in the States and Kylie Minogue in Europe and Australia, reflecting the vacuous cynicsm of a mainstream music industry acting on one of the oldest truisms of marketing - "sex sells".