Why is modern pop music today so terrible?

I'd say that it depends on what you mean by "pop" music. If you rely on TV and radio (which nobody listens to anymore) to define current "pop" quality, you're going to be depressed. 

But there's still great music out there, you just don't hear it from TV and most radio stations, which all seem to be run by Clear Channel and are just marketing to the lowest common denominator. 

But the guy in the video is basically correct;  they are feeding us recycled nursery rhymes and familiar rhythms in the hopes of tapping our subconscious and triggering sales and clicks. Music that is too original or radical gets defined as something other than "pop" and doesn't get the airtime.

This means you have to hunt for good music, which most of us find in the past. You also.have to realize that we are comparing a very narrow slice of time, now, to all recorded musical history. It's not surprising that "now" doesn't hold up in terms of quality.

A lot of the "best" music has always flown under the mass-market radar, subsiding on a cult level; Gram Parsons, John Hiatt, Rodney Crowell, Richard Thompson, Marshall Crenshaw, Dave Edmunds, and Nick Lowe, for instance. Their ARE artists of quality with a young audience around, you just have to look below the surface, like on the No Depression site for Americana music.

Always the lowest  common denominator that just gets lower over time.  But how low can it go?

Gentlemen, gentlemen....time and tide changes all...

Tastes change, as does the medium by which one gets to play it on.  The industry (and it is) responses by modifying how and what gets 'tweaked' in the process of recording for the means of playback.  Twas always thus....

I hark back to a movie, "The Phantom of the Paradise" with Paul Williams playing the Devil (or his stand-in...and a diminutive one at that *L*).  He's in a studio, recording a man whose had all his teeth removed singing a song in a voice that's barely better than a frog croaking.

After running him through the parametric EQ's and various other 'devices' (most of which have been superseded, as it IS an old movie...), his original voice is restored to it's glory....

When I read discussions like this, I *L*, and move on to the next forum...;)

The way to find good music that flies under the radar is to listen to college radio. Can now be found steaming on internet and still on FM.