None of these uses require the music to be “good”.
Actively listening to music is a somewhat rare activity.
And again I have nothing against the genre. I listen to non pop country. But people are specifically attracted to the worst of it and they seem to very actively like it.
I apologized while marveling to myself that something that felt so mediocre and forgettable to me was someone else's reason to exist.
I can't tell good music from bad; either I like the way it sounds or I don't.
I suspect a fair number of other people are like this. And more power to people who have good taste in music.
A few years ago, a group engineered the most unlikeable song ever:
Featuring bagpipes, a rapping opera singer, country music, and a children's choir singing holiday music that ends with telling you to do your shopping at Wal-mart.
There's a certain genius to how bad and obnoxious it is.
Though in a broader sense, with any creative endeavor the more people that like something, the worse it is.
For example I watched Shang-Chi the other day, which is basically pop music in film form. As someone who's watched a fair amount of films, it's easy to see how it follows all the usual generic story beats - it's good but formulaic and relatively predictable. But if it was the first film you'd ever seen it would be amazing.
You have films that intentionally subvert expectations, relying on the fact that the audience knows how the story usually goes. That's jazz music. Classical often as well. But that relies on people both knowing the usual tropes and also wanting something different - there's some comfort in the known. Many people just want the superhero film. After all, the simple formula is the most inherently powerful regardless of the audience's internal knowledge of narrative or notation - that's why it's so commonly used.
My guess is that the serendipitous combination of high-level artistry + mass appeal + marketing dollars is simply much less common than the combo of "good at basic formula" + marketing dollars. Every now and then something really clever and different makes it into the top 40 just by sheer luck.
Seems like I was wrong above about the simple formula being the most powerful though doesn't it. Maybe a brand new formula can be even more powerful but is just that much harder to execute.
Maybe it is just the case where team of experts created music many people like. People really don't mind generic when serving foods daydreaming or eating. Generic is often better, because it won't break flow of what they are doing.
If anything it feels engineered (and I use that term literally) to break your attention and make you focus on it. There tend to be lots of weird and drastic pitch and key changes that are designed to grab interest.
There is tons of music that is better background music than modern pop.
But like 10% of music let's say is absolute garbage, mostly top 40 stuff made from cosntructed bands with some models as front men, written by a team constructed by a label to create the most generically likeable music possible, edited to the point where it doesn't matter that the models are bad singers.
This music seems to account for about 90% of global music consumption as far as I can tell. I've been traveling around the world for many years and it get's depressing when you are in some remote jungle somewhere that feels like your finally off the beaten path and you get to some little shack restaurant / bar and they have One Direction on the radio. You can't fucking escape it. I've had times where I was on 3 continents on 3 months and you here the exact same garbage music regardless of location. It's crazy how ubiquitous it is.
And there is so much good music out there. If anything we are in a golden age in terms of volume of quality independent music being produced. And yet a vast majority of people seem to have no problem listening to the bottom of the barrel junk for a majority of the music they listen to.