Potential Future(s) of Pop Music

So, let's get right into this:

The landscape of pop music is always changing. This is largely due to the fact that "pop music" doesn't really describe a genre, but a trend. Sure, there is certainly a kind of music that we might all describe as generic pop, but eventually we'll have to find something else to call Carly Rae Jepsen, even if we just add "classic" to it (classic pop - now there's an oxymoron waiting to happen).

Does this still look like pop to you?

EDM, a relatively new genre, used to be reserved for ravers and hippies, but slowly we've seen it grow into and influence the mainstream scene. This has happened before with rap, R&B, grunge - virtually every major genre of music, with some overlap here and there, has had or continues to have its time in the pop music spotlight. 

Now, I like to imagine things, and all this leads me to wonder: What's next? There's no way to know until it happens, but I'd like to speculate here on three genres which, I believe, are most likely to be coming up to the plate.

The first (and, admittedly, least likely to take over) is drone music. This genre could actually have been one of the first types of pop music. Drone is characterized by one note or chord that, as the name implies, drones on for a while - sometimes the entire duration of the song. It is the "om" sound we hear when we imagine monks in deep meditation. It is the steady low note that lays the foundation of a choral song. 

Keep an ear out for Hildegard von Bingen the next time you're in Urban Outfitters.

Aspects of drone can even be seen in rock and pop music whenever a note or two are repeated (Think Arcade Fire's Wake Up). At its most basic, it sounds boring - and it can be. David Rutledge of the Australian radio show Earshot describes it as "the sound of tedium itself." Boring is not always bad, though - some drone music can be deeply relaxing or contemplative. In many ways it is the exact opposite of the energetic beats and arrangements of today's pop music. Maybe it's disqualified for already having its time in the light, but who knows - maybe the stark contrast of the drone will entice the next generation of listeners.
Recommended Learning: Earshot - Sacred Boredom
Recommended Listening: Stars of the Lid, A Winged Victory for the Sullen, Tim Hecker

The next thing I'd like to look at is something called vaporwave. This genre has been made possible entirely through the Internet. It is a nostalgia- and sample-heavy style which has, in its own community, already gone through a kind of pop-ification. The genre is admittedly a little hard to describe, and certainly very weird at times. One producer known as Wolfenstein OS X explains the name of the genre as such:

 "the word vaporwave itself is quite an anomaly - it is essentially the combination of "vaporware," a business term to describe a product which is announced to the public but never actually released, and a Marxist term to describe a prepetual repetition of ideals which are not concrete or meaningful and their philosophy described as "waves of vapor. It is very pretentious."

The "aesthetic" of vaporwave.

This last bit about pretension is actually part of why I think it could make its way to mainstream music. Big-name artists are notoriously eccentric or pretentious, and as ideas and conventions in the current dynamics of music get used up, this is a style I could see those artists turning to. Besides, there are some areas of vaporwave that have had trap and hip-hop influences incorporated into them, which could make it a natural next step in the evolution of those genres.

Recommended Learning: Vaporwave: A Brief History

Recommended Listening: Blank Banshee, Macintosh Plus, 2 8 1 4

Unfortunately, due to the sample-heavy nature of vaporwave, copyright law presents a huge stumbling block for it - as well as for our last subject, the mashup. The musical mashup (as the word applies to many types of media) is, in my opinion, the most likely to officially enter the realm of pop next. This genre is interested in recycling and re-contextualizing music by putting songs together that, at first glance, seem to have no common ground. Mashups can be highly experimental, or they could simply replace the backing track of a rap song with a different, complimentary song. Either way, the genre relies largely on theft to reach its goal - sampling and remixing existing music in the name of creativity. 

In a lot of ways, mashups have already made it.

Some artists have no problem with this - advocating it, in fact - but others, along with the music industry at large, have a big problem with it, and justifiably so. After all, it is their intellectual property.
Recommended Learning: Everything is a Remix
Recommended Listening: Girl Talk, the Hood Internet, Neil Cicierega

What do you guys think? Do any of these seem like viable options? Will things go on the way they have been? or have we reached a post-genre world, a post-music world, even?? WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN???

Let me know what you think in the comments. Meanwhile, keep your dials tuned and your ears peeled.