This article presents a state of the art in a field of scholarship still to be institutionalized in Colombian academia. In the first place, the author establishes the definition of the terms “history” and “popular music” and explains the conflictive relation between both of them in the Latin American context, in particular in Colombia. The singular evolution of music historiography in the country explains the diversity of methodologies used in the collection of data, as well as in the formats and writing styles. The article aims to provide order to a diverse and mostly empirical writing tradition that has rarely been considered a coherent field of study. This work comes out from a project of bibliographic compilation titled “Sistema de información bibliográfica sobre la investigación en Colombia” (System of Bibliographic Information about Music Scholarship in Colombia), carried out by the Grupo de Investigaciones Musicales from the Music Department, Universidad Javeriana.