Neo soul is a term coined by music industry entrepreneur Kedar Massenburg during the late 1990s to market and describe a style of music that emerged from soul and contemporary R&B. Heavily based in soul music, neo soul is distinguished by a less conventional sound than its contemporary R&B counterpart, with incorporated elements ranging from jazz, funk, and hip hop to pop, fusion, and African music. Developed in the United States and United Kingdom during the 1980s and early 1990s as a soul "revival" movement, neo soul emerged into the mainstream with the commercial and critical breakthroughs of several neo soul artists during the 1990s, as it was marketed as an alternative to the producer-driven, digitally-approached R&B of the time. Since its initial mainstream popularity and impact on the sound of contemporary R&B, it has been expanded and diversified musically through the works of both American and international artists. According to Mark Anthony Neal, "neo-soul and its various incarnations has helped to redefine the boundaries and contours of black pop"

Despite some ambivalence from artists, the term ultimately received widespread use by music critics and writers who wrote about artists and albums associated with the musical style. African American studies professor Mark Anthony Neal has described neo soul as "everything from avant-garde R&B to organic soul... a product of trying to develop something outside of the norm in R&B". According to music writers, the genre's works are mostly album-oriented and distinguished by its musicianship and production, incorporating "organic" elements of classic soul music with the use of live instrumentation, in contrast to the more single-oriented, hip hop-based, and producer-driven sampling approach of contemporary R&B. Noting that most of the genre's artists are singer-songwriters, writers have also viewed neo soul artists' lyrical content as more "conscious-driven" and having a broader range than most other R&B artists. Allmusic describes neo soul as "roughly analagous to contemporary R&B". Dimitri Ehrlich of Vibe writes that, neo soul artists "emphasize a mix of elegant, jazz-tinged R&B and subdued hip hop, with a highly idiosyncratic, deeply personal approach to love and politics"

According to music writer Peter Shapiro, the term itself refers to a musical style that obtains its influence from more classical styles, and bohemian musicians seeking a soul revival, while setting themselves apart from the more contemporary sounds of their mainstream R&B counterparts. In a 1998 article on neo soul, Time writer Christopher John Farley wrote that neo soul artists such as Lauryn Hill, D'Angelo, and Maxwell "share a willingness to challenge musical orthodoxy". In citing Tony! Toni! Tone! as progenitors of the genre, Vibe's Tony Green has viewed that the group pioneered the "digital-analog hybrid sound" and "dramatically refreshed the digitalized wasteland that was R&B in the late '80s". Neo soul artists during the 1990s were heavily inspired by the diverse sound and mellow instrumentation of Gil Scott-Heron's and Brian Jackson's collaborative work in the 1970s. All About Jazz has cited him as "one of the early architects" of the sound and his early work with Scott-Heron as "an inspirational and musical Rosetta stone for the neo-soul movement".