I think you can get a sense of that by going back a little further (maybe on YouTube) and search for top songs in the era from WWII to the early 60s. Music changed very, very quickly. Big swing bands featured singers during WWII. Singers like Vaughn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, etc., were huge during WWII and the postwar era. Eventually the bands moved to the background as accompanists for the singers. The formula was at first imitated by the next generation (people like Bobby Darin). The bands started to play a little jazzier, and eventually country music and the blues worked there way in, culminating in Elvis. Suddenly large bands were replaced by small combos featuring guitars.... electric guitars. Elvis was really a fusion of pop, rock, jazz and blues and at that point all bets were off. You saw Elvis imitators and associates like Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly, etc. Pop music was being consumed by teenagers more than ever before, with the advent of vinyl records (much more durable than glass 78s) and much more affordable, especially 45s.
All that was before I was born (so the previous is just what I've picked up along the way) but it set the table for the Beatles who came to the States when I was very, very young. The early Beatles songs are among the first I recall as pop music. The first few hits they had were still not as rock-and-rolly as Elvis was was, they were still in the pop vein I think- songs like Love Me Do, Please Please Me, From Me To You, progressed toward She Loves You, I Want to Hold Your Hand, Can't Buy Me Love, and Hard Day's Night, the latter grouping putting the Beatles solidly into the rock genre.
If you want to get a sense for how quickly it changes, cue all those Beatles songs up in order on YouTube and then play them, and they go from mellow ballads to straight up rock, dragging mainstream pop music along for the ride, in less than two years. The cool crooners were overtaken by the young and wild upstarts.
Maybe @Radar remembers it differently; he was there, but I think that might give a sense of it. Then you can follow all the later movements- Mowtown, The Sound of Philadelphia, Phil Spector's Wall of Sound, Hard Rock, Disco, the Second British Invasion, etc., etc.
The technology is there with YouTube and Wikipedia to wind your way through the music, move back and forth through time. I've personally been paying attention to the Wrecking Crew, the loose band of session musicians behind a lot of the pop music of the 1960s and early 70s. A young Glenn Campbell got is start with them as a session guitarist before making it big as a country singer. Pianist Leon Russell was prolific, almost the backbone of pop music from that era.
There are so many movements in music; even if you weren't alive then you can get some appreciation of them by diving down wormholes on the internet.
le sigh
