That's a whole lot of opinion there affecting your theory.
Pop music makes money because, as the name implies, it's popular. That doesn't mean it has to be lyrically or musically devoid of complexity. There's high quality pop music.
Pop music makes money because 1-it tends to be formulaic in it's musical composition to hit sounds that people "like". 2- the stars are young and attractive and people respond to that for a myriad of reasons. 3- the people producing the music and marketing the industry have found that it's a stable and reliable market in a time when the industry as a whole collapsed.
As someone married to a professional artist, I would also like to point out that the starving artist who just LOVES producing their Art so much is a problematic ideal that people romanticize. The bottom line is, if you produce something of value, and someone wants to procure this thing, they should respect your time. The problem is that so many artists don't value their work or time in an economic framework, and thus they drive the market rates lower for the community as a whole.
if the input to music is money, i argue that the output is poor quality music.
> Paying for things supports the enterprise that goes into providing them
and thereby changing the goal of the enterprise from producing music, to producing money from music. Look at modern pop music today? They are pretty terrible at best. And yet, the money keeps flowing in!
Nobody is saying that artists don't get paid - they get paid by selling their music in some form, and performing their music. But because the motivations for them doing music ins't due to money, the product end up being a labour of love - a true expression of art. I think patronage achieves the same goals, where as a mass market music business model doesn't get the same result because the goals of a mass market music business is to saturate, and to make sure that their audience is huge (so you end up with pop music).