Genre: Ambient Pop

Related to dream pop, and mainly developing out of both indie pop and first wave post-rock, ambient pop focuses on atmospheres and textures, melodic simplicity and hypnotic repetition. The style explores the same influences as in the first wave of post-rock, such as krautrock, minimalism and experimental forms of music in general, but does not emphasize drawn-out song structures or jamming the way post-rock does. It can often converge with styles of electronic music, especially indietronica (including glitch pop). Examples of bands in the style are Stereolab, Broadcast, Insides, Earwig, Laika, Pram, Movietone, The Sea and Cake and múm, although like post-rock. it is not a scene limited to a particular range of bands; for instance, ambient pop has shown up in the music of Radiohead (particularly so), Animal Collective and Deerhunter.

The term is often conflated with contemporary pop music songs or musicians that have used ambient sounds or pads and is wrongly applied in music journalism; this phenomenon in pop music is better described by era-specific terms like adult contemporary pop or alternative pop. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.