Popular music, as we understand the term today, was a product of the modern era, extending from the late eighteenth century through the first two-thirds of the twentieth, or from the industrial revolution through late capitalism.

The modern era brought a concentration of power in the institutions of industrialized countries and a new set of economic and social relations within the developing systems of capitalism and socialism. It was a time of the emergence of large new nation-states, swallowing up previously autonomous city-states, regions, and smaller countries; of colonialism, with a handful of European countries taking military and economic control over much of the rest of the world, and then postcolonialism, with large international conglomerates playing the same role; and of oligarchical domination within industry, finance, and both state and private institutions. In contrast, today's postmodern world is marked by fragmentation, discontinuity, ephemerality, and chaos in economics, politics, social relations, and the arts.

The intellectual and ideological climate of the modern era encouraged various writers to construct meta-narratives: broad, all-encompassing schemes purporting to yield some “special mode of representation of eternal truth.” Lyotard, who sees the modern-postmodern dialectic as a “crisis of narratives,” defines the modernist meta-narrative (in science):