Pop music sounds fake and it should stay that way. All the Mileys and Britneys didn’t spontaneously apparate into the world. They were produced in the same studio their songs were manufactured in. They are the test tube musicians necessary to perform those catchy hooks that get stuck in your head. Most importantly, they are the face of a product and you, the listener, is the consumer.

The music industry is a business and a business’ primary concern is making money. If a company already has a successful product, why change the formula? Coca-Cola tried that with New Coke to compete with Pepsi and wrote a cautionary tale about not changing the merchandise if it ain’t broke.

Just like Coke, pop music follows this same mantra and sticks with a style that listeners are familiar with. Of course, to make sure the music is especially standardized, a large chunk of the top 20 hits of the past two decades have been created by a small group of Swedish producers. But what is familiar is comforting and that’s what turns a profit.

Expecting pop music to be extensively artistic or original is like asking for my bottle of Coke to have the same nutritional content as kale. That’s not what it’s made for. While it’s true that most pop uses a third grader’s vocabulary, that doesn't mean that it’s easy to craft the perfect summer hit. Rebecca Black’s 2011 single Friday is proof that songwriting can go comically wrong. Some people can’t get over the lack of authenticity in pop music but crafting it requires some serious brainpower.

None of this means that music is dead. It’s quite the contrary. There are plenty of channels to access quality music such as SoundCloud where struggling artists post their work to the public. The downside of this influx of artistic music is that extra work is required to discover it. With pop music, it’s as easy as turning on your radio or looking at the Billboard top charts.

From a note to a chord and a catchy hook, every carpool karaoke and solo shower session begins with a song. More than anything, pop music is so appealing because it offers an experience and that’s what the consumer pays for. If you’re looking for something deep in pop, you’re looking in the wrong place. But pop is still worth putting your hands up in the air for.

Fernandez is a Spanish and rhetoric and writing Junior from Allen. Follow her on Twitter @blancoalyssa.