In recent years a new form of rhythm and blues music came about. It emerged because of the need to define it differently from other types of R&B that came before it.
Contemporary Rhythm and Blues came from a need to put all the new forms of music together into one basket, including hip-hop, blues, pop, soul and funk. So many genres emerged that could be classed as R&B in some way that they needed to be grouped as a whole.
It could be said that it is since the 1980’s disco scene that contemporary R&B started being used. This type of music has been fluid since the 1980’s, different music forms that merged becoming the contemporary form of Rhythm and Blues.
Artists such as Michael Jackson brought contemporary R&B into the mainstream music culture. The type of music became a merge of R&B with pop which gave it a larger audience than it ever had before.
In the 2000’s hip hop as part of contemporary R&B achieved a similar rise in popularity, in the same way as R&B crossed over in the 1990’s. Rappers became big commercial successes and were becoming popular music, rather than just one small genre.
R&B began being incorporated into other types of music and it became a way of making music trendy and appealing to an audience who were followers of Hip Hop and Rhythm and Blues.
A common occurrence in R&B is that certain styles start off small and less well known and then become main stream as artists become more popular or they become used by already popular artists.
Contemporary R&B can often be said to be more polished than earlier forms of R&B, it has become mainstream and so becomes in a sense more like the pop music public are used to listening to. This has be
en the way contemporary R&B has moved in recent years and it will continue to change as time goes on. Perhaps a new form of R&B will merge into which the old category will fall.
There were possibly no other ways to classify a type of music such as had been emerging in recent years. It was only with the emergence of contemporary R&B that we are able to classify R&B in a world full of different types of music.
Contemporary R&B artists have become some of the biggest selling musicians there have ever been. In the United States R&B has accounted for many of the top selling artists over the last 20 years.
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