Popular Music Trends of Greece

The traditional singer-songwriters first emergence was in the 1960s after the Dionysis Sawopoulos in the year 1966 breakthrough album Fortigho, many of these artists begun out playing Neo kyma, new wave (not to be confused with the new wave rock), a combination of entekhno and chansons from France.

Sawopoulos combined American musicians like Frank Zappa and Bob Dylan with Macedonian traditional music and politically perceptive lyrics. In his wake came more folk influenced performers such as Arleta, Mariza Koch, Mihalis Violaris. Kostas Hatzis and the composers Giannis Spanos, this music scene flourished in a specific kind of boite de nuit.

A notable musical movement in the 1970s during the Junta of 1967 to 1974 and a few years after its end was the rise in popularity of the topical songs (political song). Classical entekhno singers associated with this movement include Thanos Mikroutsikos, Giannis Markopoulos, Mikis Theodorakis and Manos Loizos.

Nikos Xydakis, one of Sawopoulos pupils was among the people who transformed laiko by using Orientalized instrumentation. His most successful songs as 1987s Konda sti Dhoxa mia Stigmi recorded with Eleftheria Arvanitaki.

Thanasis Pplykandriotis, laiko singer and classically trained bouzouki players, became well-known for his combination of rebetiko and orchestral music as in his 1996 composition concert for Bouzouki and orchestra No. 1.

 A famous movement since the late 1980s has been the mixture of entekhno (urban folk ballads with artistic lyrics) with pop/ soft rock music. Moreover, certain composers like Dimitris Papadimitrious have been motivated by elements if the classical entekhno tradition and written songs cycles for singers of current entekhno music, like Fotini Dara. The most popular current entekhno lyricist is Lina Nikolakopoulou.

There are however other singers of instrumental and incidental music (including the film scores and music for the stage), whose work cannot be easily classified, such as Stamatis Spanoudakis, Evanthia Remboutsika, Eleni Karaindrou, Nikos Mamangakis, Nikos Kypourgos, Giorgos Tsangaris, Giorgos Hatzinasios and Giannis Spanos. Vangelis and Yanni were among the few Greek instrumental composers who became internationally popular; their work however had little influence on the tradition of Greek instrumental music.

Regarding the purely western pop music, even though it has always had a measured amount of listeners supporting it throughout the history of the post 1960s Greek music, it has only very recently late 2000s reached the fame of laiko/laika and there is a tendency among urban traditional musicians to turn to more pop-oriented sounds.

Following the classification of conventional and categories it may be occasionally overlap with each other. Each artist is entries under the genre title that the Greek musical press usually classifies his or her.

The following are the Greek new wave from 1960s to 1970s; Mihalis Violaris, Arleta (singer), Keti Chomata, Giannis Spanos, Kostas Hatzis, Dionysis Sawopoulos, Mariza Koch and Giannis Poupoulos.