Others may like today's pop but it's a slippery slope. Those others might be 12 yo who have no knowledge of or affinity to music. They buy it because it speaks to their pubescent angst (first kiss, dating scene, current fashions, etc) and often buy simply because other kids are. They could care less if the music is any good and, in fact, wouldn't know the difference. In truth, if the music was actually progressive, they wouldn't like it. Part of the appeal is that it is simplistic enough for them to understand.

That's fine except if that's lopsidedly where all the money is in the recording industry then all the other artists find themselves needing to appeal to it to have careers. This has been the trend for a few decades now and it is getting worse.

"Since the '50s, there has been a decrease not only in the diversity of chords in a given song, but also in the number of novel transitions, or musical pathways, between them. In other words, while it's true that pop songs have always been far more limited in their harmonic vocabularies than, say, a classical symphony … past decades saw more inventive ways of linking their harmonies together than we hear now. It's the difference between Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe" (2012), which contains four simple chords presented one after another almost as blocks, and Alex North's "Unchained Melody" (1955), which, though also relatively harmonically simple (it employs about six or seven chords, depending on the version), transitions smoothly from chord to chord due to more subtle orchestration."
--J. Bryan Lowder

You take a song like "I Can't Get Started With You" from 1936. It is written in a I-vi-ii-V7 scheme. It was done by countless jazz bands and singers--Anita O'Day, Bunny Berrigan, Ella Fitzgerald, Lester Young, etc. By the 50s, it had helped to give birth to doo-wop. How? Because doo-wop is very often I-vi-ii-V7.

Here's how to play "I Can't Get Started" barebones with your guitar:

Playing in C major in 4/4 time, play in the first bar Cmaj7 and Amin7. Then in the second bar play Dmin7 and G7. Third bar: E7, Amin7. Fourth bar: D7, G7sus. Fifth bar: Cmaj7, Amin7. Sixth bar: Dmin7, G7 with a flatted 9th. At this point, you hit a two-bar turnaround and go back to the first bar and repeat up to the sixth bar again.

Notice CADG--I-vi-ii-V. That's the same scheme used in so many doo-wops. But notice that in the third bar, we use an E7 rather than Cmaj7. Isn't E a iii in the scale of C and shouldn't it then be minor? No. E7 is used as a substitute for Cmaj7 and is technically still I in the scale. It throws a variation into the scheme so it doesn't become monotonous. In fact, I-vi is just an alternate ii-V. Doo-wop plays with that scheme in endless variations which is why it is so harmonically rich with only 4 voices.

Most pop songs since the 50s have opted for simple ii-V7 songs. A repeating bar rather than repeating every two bars. I think that's why Gene Vincent started combining rockabilly with doo-wop--it gave the rockabilly more variation and harmonic content. Just a small change in one chord would change the way the song sounded.

This is long gone in pop music today. So while we can say it still has value, we do have to concede that there has been some degeneration because all the artists that want to be big sellers have to "dumb down" their music for the sake of money/sales/profits. That does hurt us culturally speaking.

Someone mentioned Esperanza Spalding. She used to be jazz. Her first two releases were utterly brilliant. Her next two are not even jazz. She started turning into a pop diva. They want her to sing more and play less. Her bass lines have appropriately simplified. On her 4th CD, "Radio Music Society" her basslines can be played by anyone with two years of decent instruction. A far cry from the amazing basslines she was chunking off on those first two CDs that totally blew me away. It has made her a commercial success but at the sacrifice of her creativity.

Does that make me a snob to say all this? I don't think so but others might.