Thai pop music

Thai pop (abbreviated as T-pop), is a genre of Thai music roughly equivalent to pop music. It emerged in the 1960s–1980s, during which it was known as string music, before gaining mainstream popularity during the 1990s and has since dominated the Thai music industry. The term is extremely broad, covering Thai rock, dance music, hip hop music and western-influenced popular music in general, though normally excluding the folk and rock-influenced phleng phuea chiwit (songs for life). The origins of string lie in American R&B, surf-rock artists like The Ventures and Dick Dale, Exotica, rockabilly and country and western brought to Thailand by American and Australian soldiers serving in Vietnam in the late 1950s and early 1960s.