In OTL, when the British working class of the Victorian era developed, many former folk songs, and naval sea shanties developed into work songs and tavern songs fit for the conditions and rhythm of urban life centered around small tenements, strenous factory work, inequality, the pleasures of sexuality and occasionally getting something better to eat, and the small amount of leisure time workers could have in the pub or at home.
Sadly, the development of this new, early industrial music is not well documented, given the classism and strict morals of the time period, but from what little I could find, it seems to mirror a similar development taking place in 1970s and 80s Britain and Eastern Europe, and the growth of the Punk subculture, when young blue collar workers started making increasingly raucous and down-to-earth songs based on their experiences in life.
The most recognizable legacy of this era of OTL music history are the workers' protest songs, whose style the early Socialist and Communist movements adopted.
But what if, next to the protest songs, another development took place that created a loud and fast-paced music thematically centered around sharing in the hardships and emotions the new industrial life has brought?
The loudness of the music could be justified by many workers getting permanent hearing damage from the early, loud machines they toiled at every day, and the quickening of the rhythm could be explained by the faster-paced life the new technologies of the Industrial Revolution have brought.
Around 1890, a musically-inclined worker shares his opinions, experiences, sorrows, and joys in life with the crowd in a pub in a song reminiscent of the earlier folk song-inspired ballads that all of them had heard before. However, he suddenly picks the pace up and starts singing the chorus in a very loud voice with a fast tempo:
♫"The houses and towns all grew up with you,
Tired rundown railways, stone bridges!
If on cold nights, all the lights fade out,
my soul is wildened and tortured by a song!
Tell me, what do you want?!
You little, you big, you ugly, and nice!
Or has everything you yearned for been already lost?
And a song tortures you, wherever you go!"♫*
Although electric guitars and amplification are still decades off technologically, the style of music still has some effect, and more and more songs with a similar rhythm and theme are eventually written.
Do you think a development like this is possible? How would it alter history?
*
I know my "song sample" doesn't rhyme and is not very well-paced, I'm not a poet and just wanted to demonstrate what I was thinking about. BTW, the lyrics were inspired by a song of an early 1980s Hungarian rock band called "Edda", the song is "Kínoz egy ének".