Soft Rock
Soft rock is a gentle, melodic style of rock with smooth production, acoustic guitars, piano and quiet vocals.
It took shape in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States and Britain as a calmer answer to hard rock. Songs are slow to mid-tempo, often about love and relationships, with close vocal harmonies and little distortion. It was a staple of 1970s radio and shades into adult contemporary pop.
Artists it is known for: Carpenters, Bread, Air Supply, Chicago.
- Family
- Rock
- On Spotify
- A current genre
- What it is
- A genre
- From
- United States and United Kingdom, late 1960s
- Also called
- light rock
- Trackify listeners who play it
- 23%
About 19,000 of 83,000 Trackify listeners with public profiles have soft rock among their top artists of the last four weeks. Rounded; updated 13 November 2026.
Soft Rock artists
Malcolm Todd
Fleetwood Mac
Billy Joel
Dire Straits
Eagles
George Harrison
Daryl Hall & John Oates
Paul McCartney
Bee Gees
Steely Dan
The soft rock 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.