Why are there so many Taylor Swift fans here?

[If my soul was made of stone]

Because her music is generally high quality and she seems like a good person.

I agree that she seems like a good person but I seriously can not imagine so many teenage males listening to a female pop star when I was in high school.

The breakdown of the gender tribalism enforced by consumer culture is a good thing. Celebrate it, BRTD.

[If my soul was made of stone]

I don't see poptimism as an inherently good or bad thing, just another lens through which to view the musical landscape that can be used wisely or become excessive or patronizing. As Crabcake and Nathan point out, plenty of noted currents in less mainstream forms of music have come from adopting a "pop" ethos, even with a very different aesthetic, but when that in turn becomes part of the mainstream then there are inevitably both knockoffs and counter-reactions in its wake that run it into the ground and often obscure why the innovation became salient to begin with. I don't think that any era of popular music is inherently superior to any other, as "rockists" tend to allege with a wide range of unconvincing canards about the perceived authenticity of past movements, and while I'm not tuned in to many present developments in any form of music I have still found much to respect when I have looked.

The relation of pop to more "serious" forms of music is particularly evident to me as a conservatory student with high and avant-garde tastes in the Western Art Music Canon™. Since the 1950s especially the academic world has been very split between those who want to engage with the broader world and those who such as Babbitt or Boulez who have sought an ivory tower of music-as-science, in many cases the former emerging as a reaction to the latter. The emergence of minimalism in the following decade was for many a very refreshing experience, with its incorporation of various popular and global musics and lack of pretensions, but with popularity and exposure it eventually bifurcated itself from its origins into the two streams I alluded to above: the watered-down lowest-common-denominator fare typical of late Glass, and the academic reuptake into the tremendous pretentious boredom of post-minimalists like Adams. All the while, the academic music that it reacted against continued in its own spheres, alternately beautiful and unbearable. Ultimately, all movements in art are bound to lose their steam and sacrifice their fire to capitalist forces for eternal life, but most will make a worthwhile impact before then.

I try to find the value in all approaches, even when their philosophies jar with mine.