Originally Posted by Xurtio

I think it's from the perspective that "pop" is defined by popularity, not actual tone or flavor or audio or other'splained mechanics of the music. It's either popular enough to market to the largest demographic or it's not, and the underlying audio mechanics change as a function of that.

Well ****, I guess it's not really different than any other genre in terms of this Darwinian metric... except that it's more derived and constructed through mass analysis than growing organically from subcultures.