had come to constitute a diversity of loosely associated style codes. With the arrival of a "progressive" label, the music was dubbed "progressive pop" before it was called "progressive rock". "Progressive" referred to the wide range of attempts to break with the standard pop music formula. A number of additional factors contributed to the label—lyrics were more poetic, technology was harnessed for new sounds, music approached the condition of "art", some harmonic language was imported from jazz and 19th-century classical music, the album format overtook singles, and the studio, rather than the stage, became the focus of musical activity, which often involved creating music for listening, not dancing. Background During the mid 1960s, pop music made repeated forays into new sounds, styles, and techniques that inspired public discourse among its listeners. The word "progressive" was frequently used, and it was thought that every song and single was to be a "progression" from the last. In 1966, the degree of social and artistic dialogue among rock musicians dramatically increased for bands such as the Beach Boys, the Beatles, and the Byrds who fused elements of composed (cultivated) music with the oral (vernacular) musical traditions of rock. Rock music started to take itself seriously, paralleling earlier attempts in jazz (as swing gave way to bop, a move which did not succeed with audiences). In this period, the popular song began signaling a new possible means of expression that went beyond the three-minute love song, leading to an intersection between the "underground" and the "establishment" for listening publics. The Beach Boys' leader Brian Wilson is credited for setting a precedent that allowed bands and artists to enter a recording studio and act as their own producers. The music was developed immediately following a brief period in the mid 1960s where creative authenticity among musical artists and consumer marketing coincided with each other. Before the progressive pop of the late 1960s, performers were typically unable to decide on the artistic content of their music. Assisted by the mid 1960s economic boom, record labels began investing in artists, giving them freedom to experiment, and offering them limited control over their content and marketing. The growing student market serviced record labels with the word "progressive", being adopted as a marketing term to differentiate their product from "commercial" pop. Music critic Simon Reynolds writes that beginning with 1967, a divide would exist between "progressive" pop and "mass/chart"