a critical view to the some researches on the popular music in iran

research on popular music in iran has a short history. perhaps the article “sociology of the music of the masses in iran”, published in 1980, can be considered as the first methodological and systematic study on the popular music in iran.  in that article, the researcher, using marxist and neo-marxist approaches to study popular music, provides a general view on the music of the masses of the pre-revolution era in iran. it is worth mentioning that, ever since the publication of mentioned article, the amount of research conducted on popular music in iran has been quite low, even though the production and consumption of popular music in iran has a considerably richer history. production and consumption of popular music in iran as a country in transition has a long history. up to now dsifferent genres of popular music in iran has produced such as pop, rock, jazz, heavy metal and etc. the history of production and consumption of music in iran can be traced back to the time of the introduction of technological aspects of the western modernity to iran;  however, the gap between the production of popular music in its particular sense in iran, and the concern of researchers for a methodological study of this phenomenon in rather long. early research on popular music in west almost coincides with the provision of a social context for the production and consumption of popular music. regardless of the problematic gap between the rise of popular music and the conduct of methodological research on them in iran, another issue is that these studies are not a theoretical and methodological study. in today’s iran, despite the expansion of the frontiers of knowledge related to the study of popular music, such as sociology, anthropology, psychology, and educational science, and the establishment of specialized interdisciplinary fields such as musicology and folk musicology in universities and research centers, we do not yet witness the establishment of an interdisciplinary field related to the “popular music studies”, similar to the one which has developed an independent identity in the form of traditional theories and a variety of methodologies for research on popular music in west. this paper aims to study the domestic research experiences on popular music, whose results are generally published in scientific and specialized publications (such as mahoor music quarterly, university of tehran journal of social sciences, iranian journal of cultural researches, university of tehran journal of sociology of art and literature, university of tehran journal of fine arts, iranian journal of sociology) , in order to analyze the possibility of forming the interdisciplinary field of “popular music studies”, and answerthe question, why studies on popular music have not gained a standard form in iran yet? what is evident from the popular music studies in west is that, determining a field of study in the area of popular music studies is a very essential perquisite for purposeful studies on popular music, and this, in turn, asserts the necessity of forming such an enterprise in iran