Download easy listening music. Create a peaceful, restful atmosphere in your home, work or car. Sit back and relax and let the music take away all the stress life can bring. This easy listening music features acoustic guitar, catchy melodies, laid-back songs and soft jazz. Let the music quieten you as you rest in a peaceful ambience. Listen to more easy listening music, purchase cds or download mp3s below:
Easy listening music is a style of popular music and radio format that emerged in the mid-20th century, evolving out of swing and big band music, and related to Beautiful music and Light music. Easy listening music features simple, catchy melodies, soft, laid-back songs and occasionally rhythms suitable for couples dancing. The genre includes both instrumental forms (often played on light of tone instruments such as the Hammond Organ, "lush strings", or Ukulele); and vocal forms featuring pop singers, such as Raphael, Barbra Streisand, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Jack Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck, Eydie Gorme, Barry Manilow, Harry Connick Jr., Frank Sinatra, Andrea Bocelli, Johnny Mathis, Bing Crosby, Tom Jones and Mel Tormé. Exotica music stylists such as Les Baxter and Martin Denny are often included within the purview of easy listening music as well.
The easy listening radio format has been generally but not completely superseded by the "Lite AC" form of Adult contemporary music radio. 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. Often, songs were re-arranged instrumental "cover" versions of popular songs of the 1960s and 1970s custom-produced for the radio format during its peak in popularity.
Billboard magazine and the now-defunct trade Record World celebrated "easy listening" singles through independently-audited record charts. Generally 40 positions in length, they charted airplay on stations such as WNEW, New York City and KMPC, Los Angeles. Record World ended these charts approx. 1972. Billboard's chart morphed to the more appropriate designation "Adult Contemporary" in 1979, and continues to this day.
Since easy listening music as such is rather unknown to the younger generation, the term "easy listening" is often incorrectly applied to other genres such as soft rock, soft pop or smooth jazz music. However this problem arises due to the fact that the actual definition is relatively broad. Easy listening music is also sometimes referred to as "mood music", "elevator music" (and in the UK as "lift music").
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Easy Listening".
