Can music progress?: Reflections on the history of popular music

This paper considers schematically the various discourses through which popular music history is understood. My proposal is that five accounts of musical history (the business model, the musicological model, the sociological model, the historical model and the art history model) are commonly deployed in popular music discourse. One implies, superficially at least, that popular music evolves, gets better; four implies that, at least in the longer term, it does not. The concept of ′progress′ is shown to be problematic.