Sport wasn't the only nonliterary form of entertainment.
As previously suggested, for the majority of the population music used to be what was heard at church or around the village, but concentrated urban populations brought with them the possibility of staged popular as well as serious musical performances, and the readers of popular magazines and newspapers could be treated to new topical material based on known tunes (airs).
It's the music halls of Victorian England or the vaudeville theatres across the Atlantic where you start to see the emergence of what we might recognize as popular music.
Up to this point, as far as I can see, music in the western world at least, fell into three distinct categories. There was music for the church, music for the royal court, concert hall or opera house and music for the population at large. The first two categories tended to be written formally, the third wasn't necessarily written, but tended to spread through the community by what some would refer to as the folk process.
What was later to become known as Folk music, of course, was shaped by a number of other influences, including the developing music curriculum in the education system but at the same time there’s no doubt that there was a substantial body of music that was passed down through the oral tradition.
By the late nineteenth century with the emergence of new forms of entertainment there’s a fourth category, popular music that borrows some elements from the other categories but is written largely by professional writers to be performed on stage and later on screen, and while it drew from outside influences, this new popular music was written to meet fairly specific requirements.
First, it had to entertain. There wasn't much room for exploration of complex philosophical issues, for example. It could approach serious subjects, but it could only go so far, usually only far enough to express some fairly conventional emotions, usually involving pride or sentiment.
Second, it helped if the writer could find a way to involve the audience. One obvious way to do that was to provide a catchy chorus that encouraged the listener to sing along, but, equally important, the tune needed to be simple enough to be played by people with limited or minimal music skills. That's something that we’ve tended to forget a little later on, but in the days before the emergence of recorded music a big part of a songwriter's income came from the sale of sheet music, song books and even player piano rolls.
There's little doubt that people played and sang music to a much greater extent than they tend to do today. Today we tend to listen to the sounds made by others, but back then before the widespread distribution of recorded music people listened, once they were out of the theatre or music hall, to music they'd made themselves. One statistic that struck me as weird when I met it close to forty years ago came at the front of Humphrey MacQueen's A New Britannia, where it was pointed out that over the course of the nineteenth century seven hundred thousand pianos were imported into Australia. Considering that the continent's population didn't pass a million until well into the nineteenth century, that's an amazing statistic (if it’s true) and you'd suspect that the majority of them wouldn't have been played by technically skilled concert pianists.
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