For example, on Trinity Sunday 1963, Tagg’s anthem Duo Seraphim[3] was performed at Matins by the Choir of King's College, Cambridge under David Willcocks.

[4] Dismayed at the prospect of becoming a music teacher in 1966,[5] Tagg moved to Sweden where he taught English in Filipstad while running a youth club[6] and playing keyboards in two local bands (1966–68).

Problems encountered in this work provoked him to develop analysis methods addressing the specificities of structure and meaning in various types popular music, e.g. the “Kojak thesis” (1979)[10] and the reception tests at the basis of his book Ten Little Title Tunes (2003).

[11] Tagg was at this time also songwriter and keyboard player in the left-wing “rock cabaret” band Röda Kapellet (1972–76).

[14] In April 1991, Tagg returned to the UK where he established the basis of what became EPMOW (Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World).

In 2000 Bob Clarida and Philip Tagg set up the Mass Media Music Scholars' Press (MMMSP) as a not-for-profit corporation registered in the state of New York.

He has adapted Charles Seeger's notion of the museme to demonstrate how combinations of such units are used to create both syncritic (intensional) structures inside the extended present, and diatactical (extensional) ones over time.

[27] In June 2014, Tagg received a Lifetime Recognition Award from the International Semiotics Institute at its conference in Kaunas, Lithuania.