Is it simply the way it’s marketed? Musically speaking, I don’t see much difference between Motown and Nsync aside from artists that are labelled “R&B” generally being black or mixed race (or at least having an “urban image”) while white artists are given the “Pop” label.
Pop is a broader term that includes R & B.
This thread may be better located in Cafe Society.
Yes, not sure what you are asking? Pop simply means “popular” - so punk, country, new-strummy folk, electronic dance music, etc. all have representation in the rankings and sonic profile of “pop” these days.
R&B is a groove-oriented music with roots in blues, jazz, gospel/soul, and hip hop, and obviously is well-represented in pop.
Their Venn Diagram bubbles overlap, but aren’t the same.
I’m sort of struggling with the question. To me, Motown is pop - at least the Motown music from the 70s and 80s.
There are probably doctoral theses on the subject of what constitutes “pop” music. Generally it is flash bang here today gone tomorrow. The music charts are littered with one-hit performers.
Whom we love and cherish in memory. 
Personally I’ve never considered rhythm and blues to be outside pop.
I do think a lot of it comes down to marketing. A singer like Rihanna can be marketed as an R&B singer or a pop singer depending on the commercial aims.
Periodically there is controversy over which songs should be allowed to appear on the R&B charts versus which on the pop charts (or both) in Billboard magazine. Most recently the complaint has been that the R&B charts are too full of pop. Sometimes eyebrows are raised when the pop chart becomes dominated by R&B material (meaning blacker, dancier stuff).
There was a moment in the 1960s when Billboard discontinued the R&B chart because it was too similar to the pop chart (the “Hot 100” to be precise).
Seeing as R&B preceded hip hop by several decades, I think that’s backwards – hip hop has roots in R&B, not vice versa. Some current R&B may show influences from hip hop, but it’s not an offshoot of it.
This thread is best suited to Cafe Society. I’ll relocate it.
Blasphemers earn the scourge!
To equate Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, et al with Britney Spears, Taylor Swift and their ilk! There are no words…
Yeah, on one level “pop music” is simply the music that’s popular.
The word “pop” can also be used to (try to) refer to a specific style or genre of music, but as such it’s really hard to pin down or define. I notice that AllMusic’s list of genres groups pop together with rock (their examples: U2, The White Stripes, Lady Gaga, Chuck Berry), while making R&B a separate category (examples: Alicia Keys, Marvin Gaye, Drake, The Drifters). Whether pop is conflated with rock or with R&B or with disco or whatever may have a lot to do with what style of music was truly popular at the era the person making the categorization first really became aware of different styles of music. And, yes, “R&B” has sometimes been used more or less as code for “music by African-American performers.”
Agreed. Gaye, Robinson, Franklin were ‘soul’ R&B artists. Others, like The Supremes were more on the pop side of things, despite being part of the Motown scene. Spears, Swift and others are as far removed from that as Pluto is from Earth.
Motown had some pop artists certainly but the great majority of their artists just would not have fit that designation. Diana Ross, Michael Jackson and a few others definitely went pop but by then the iconic Motown was on its last legs.
In my (old) brain:
the quintessential R&B group: Glayds Knight and the Pips
the quintessential pop group: The Bangles (and any of a million other groups singing meaningless but peppy tunes).
Pop was once a shortening of “popular,” but it’s now a specific genre – peppy songs about love and having fun.
Motown was considered pop in the 60s, but it’s not now. It’s purely R&B, which is pretty much a genre of black artists, with a focus on ballads.
The redefinition of genres is common. I remember someone here categorizing the Grateful Dead as country – a definition that would have gotten nothing but laughs, scorn, and odd looks back in the 60s and 70s. But country has changed since then and calling the Dead part of that category is not out of the question.
If you trust the folks behind Wikipedia, then look at
I agree with this. I make a distinction between “popular music” – which in my mind includes almost everything except classical music; i.e., the music people listen to for fun or enjoyment, as opposed to academic exploration, historical reenactment, sacred music or advertising jingles – and “pop” which is just the Top 40 stuff du jour. Then there are terms like “pop rock” or “pop punk” which seem to harken back to a time when “pop” just meant “catchy and not too serious”.
The past couple decades of Top 40 has been a sort of bland synth-pop dance music that I wouldn’t call rock or R&B. But don’t forget that the Beatles were a pop band. Stevie Wonder was pop. Back in the day, pop seemed to encompass more stylistic variety – though it was mostly crap then, too, don’t let Stevie fool you.
I agree with these comments.
I’m not going to claim to know all that much about the history of radio genre classification and segregation, but I do remember when I was a kid (white and parents mostly played “black” music) there were a lot of hit songs and artists on “black radio” (and you could say the same for MTV/videos) that did not “crossover” to the pop charts for whatever reason, and it seemed race or at least image of the performer had something to do with it. I think THAT reason may have less to with the way things are separated now, but there are certainly categorizations that make little sense. If anything now, with pop supposedly more “rhythmic” oriented, I actually see a lot of white POP (and dance music) artists played only on alternative and rock stations. It still has a lot to do with image. A lot of it is time/era difference. I find it hard to compare the categorization of N Sync and Motown (at least if it wasn’t the Motown label of the 1990s/2000s, which I’m assuming was not meant), just 2 completely different eras. And FWIW, much of Motown was considered pop and N Sync had R&B play. A better question might be why N Sync was considered pop and on MTV, while black boy bands of the era with similar styles were limited to BET/R&B. Or, why do rock stations play Beastie Boys and Eminem but no other similar music?
I just now located this old link (updated recently so it’s not a vanished archive) that may be as comprehensive a breakdown of genres as I’ve been able to find, for those who enjoy splitting hairs 
My intent was to state that R&B is the major river, and hip hop is a big tributary flowing into it. I believe we are in agreement.
Motown was a song style where clearly, the R&B and Pop circles overlapped a ton. Barry Gordy’s structured songcraft approach paralleled the Brill Building approach of the great songwriters of NY. That was the pop chassis that they built around.
I don’t really consider Rihanna R&B at all actually, but I’ve heard her classified as that simply because she is black. I suppose a couple of her songs like “If It’s Lovin’ That You Want” might qualify as R&B though.