From the Neapolitan and American song of the first half of the 19th century to rock and songwriting up to the music that is consumed today through streaming providers, an unmissable journey into the world of notes. Time for a song is a collection of essays on popular music, on which Franco Fabbri has worked in the last ten years and until very recently: it is a period in which topics and research methods cultivated in his long career as a scholar. Above all, more than half of the essays have been written and published in other languages and were previously unpublished in Italian: among these, some are by far the most read - in the original language - by a vast international audience. Popular music is studied from different points of view: historical (from the Neapolitan and American song in the first half of the nineteenth century, up to the rebetic, and then to rock, beat, songwriting, from the fifties to the present day), analytical (the sound of surf bands, Pink Floyd, progressive rock, Peter Gabriel, De André, music listened to using streaming providers), and theoretical (classifications by genres, different trends in music studies, plagiarism). There is also space for essays on film music, for the impact of technologies on the production and consumption of music, for reflections on the publishing and recording industry and on copyright.