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Easy listening

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

Circa 1980, easy listening was the most listened-to radio format in America. However, the easy-listening format soon 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.


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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. It is sometimes called Nostalgia music.

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 improvisation than easy listening. 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 applied to soft pop, Smooth Jazz or new age music. Easy listening music is also sometimes known as "mood music" or "MOR", 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. Easy listening erroneously refers to instrumental elevator music by some.

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Articles lacking sources from December 2006 | All articles lacking sources | Radio formats

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