Power pop is a popular musical genre that draws its inspiration from 1960s British and American pop and rock music. It typically incorporates a combination of musical devices such as strong melodies, crisp vocal harmonies, economical arrangements, and prominent guitar riffs. Instrumental solos are usually kept to a minimum, and blues elements are largely downplayed. Recordings tend to display production values that lean toward compression and a forceful drum beat. Instruments usually include one or more electric guitars, an electric bass guitar, a drum kit, and sometimes electric keyboards or synthesizers. While its cultural impact has waxed and waned over the decades, power pop is among rock's most enduring subgenres.

In the 1980s and 1990s, power pop continued as a commercially modest genre. Artists such as the Spongetones,p. 58 Marshall Crenshaw, Del Amitri, The Smithereens, Matthew Sweet, Tommy Keene, Redd Kross, Material Issue and The Posies drew inspiration from Big Star, the Beatles, and glam rock groups of the early 1970s like T.Rex and Sweet. Albums such as Jellyfish's Bellybutton (1990) and Teenage Fanclub's Bandwagonesque (1991) would be greatly influential within the genre, but few translated to mainstream success.

In the mid-1990s through the 2000s, power pop flourished in the underground with acts such as The Shazam and Sloan. Independent record labels such as Not Lame Recordings, Parasol, Kool Kat Musik and Jam Recordings specialized in the genre. The sound made a mainstream appearance in 1994 with Weezer's commercially successful Blue Album and hit single "Buddy Holly". Although generally thought of as a 'boy band', the style of the highly popular pop group the Jonas Brothers has been referred to as 'power pop', and the group has been credited with reviving an interest in power pop. Sarah Rodman of The Boston Globe has stated that the band plays "an increasingly substantial brand of power pop that grows more palatable to the general population with each release."