I think people misunderstand how & why pop music tends to be simple and banal, relative to more grown up genres. This is kind of tangental to the article, but s

I think people misunderstand how & why pop music tends to be simple and banal, relative to more grown up genres. This is kind of tangental to the article, but somehow always part of the discussion about hits. People usually blame labels and such, risk averse and uninspired. I think this isn't the real reason. Take The Beatles and all the British rock from the mid to late 60s, Stones, Zepelin, etc. They basically took American "delta blues," a rich, but fringe musical tradition and they played their simpler version of it. They weren't (especially at the start) the same level of musicians as the original blues guys. They played it as well as they could, a simpler version. It came without the racial baggage & cultural biases. The result is a more digestible version. There's a version of this story for Elvis, and lots of other pop icons. The musical and cultural palates of suburban teenagers couldn't digest bluegrass, boogie boogie, delta rules or other mature folk sounds. They could digest the beetles, a simplified version blended with the pop music sounds people were used to. The Beatles' music matured and fanned out as did the whole scene that came with them. People could take the harder sounds that they adopted. Rock became its own mature genre. I don't think Kashmir would have sounded as good in 1963 as it did in 1973, before Clapton, Jeff Beck and the other artists from that movement gradually built that guitar style on top of a simplified blues base. That's what pop is. It's an accessible version of music. Boy bands sing harmonies that you could find in 19th century music that kids would hate. They simplify it, sprinkle it with sounds that kids are used to and package it in my-older-brothers-handsome-friend form. We see this with a lot of indie music. An eclectic mix of folk music. Django guitar and ella fitzgerald vocals. Its repackaging music for new listeners. Teenagers are new to everything so this type of music works well for them. It's not a bad thing and its not an insidious plot.