MPB
MPB, short for música popular brasileira, is a broad style of Brazilian popular song that grew out of bossa nova in the mid-1960s.
It blends samba, bossa nova and regional Brazilian folk with jazz, rock and pop, usually built around acoustic guitar and carefully written lyrics. The style was shaped by televised song festivals and by artists writing under the military government of the 1960s and 1970s, so many songs carry veiled political meaning. It is looser and more varied than bossa nova, and more focused on songwriting than samba.
Artists it is known for: Chico Buarque, Elis Regina, Caetano Veloso, Milton Nascimento.
- Family
- Brazilian
- On Spotify
- A current genre
- What it is
- A genre
- From
- Brazil, mid-1960s
- Also called
- música popular brasileira
- Trackify listeners who play it
- 2%
About 1,700 of 83,000 Trackify listeners with public profiles have mpb among their top artists of the last four weeks. Rounded; updated 13 November 2026.
MPB artists
Charlie Brown Jr.
Jorge Ben Jor
Djavan
Chico Buarque
Marina Sena
Tim Maia
Gal Costa
Legião Urbana
Rita Lee
ANAVITÓRIA
The mpb artists most Trackify listeners have in their top fifty. Each opens on Spotify.
Sources
The definition is written for this site from open sources, and was checked against them on 13 November 2026.