Pop

The ubiquity of pop music means easy accessibility; listeners will tend to hear it more often than other styles.  Listeners become receptive to an emotional connectivity associated with content and patterns of sound common to pop music genres. 

Whether in ballad, rock, or dance, these common patterns are built around repetitive rhythms and refrains, and are made cohesive with instrumentation anchored to bass guitar and percussion.  Listeners come to enjoy this frame of reference in the music they prefer; it is imprinted, to whatever extent, as a subtext in the listener's consciousness. 

Music that does not fit this paradigm, with its rhythm, instrumentation, tempo, and "hooks", is not as accessible. We can observe also the cultural conditioning that effects some listeners in their choices as they identify with certain musical styles, often to the exclusion of others.  The same set of expectations for what defines "music" is in play; classical music and jazz, for example, along with country music and blues, share the aforementioned elements in varying degrees.

While these elements, those of instrumentation, repetition, and rhythmic pulsation may be utilized in the creation of ambient music, they are not essential to it.  Yet the nature of the ambient style, which complements moods and atmospheres and times of day given to activities unburdened by stress and frenetic pace, can be enjoyed by anyone who experiences it in such a context.  In form and function, it is not unlike a kind of audio impressionism, expressionism, or pop art.