There are genuinely people (mostly girls between the ages of 9 and 15) who genuinely like bland, generic, written-to-a-formula pop.
But I think a lot of people have never heard anything better. If your general frame of reference consists of Miley Cyrus for "rock" and 50 cent for "hip-hop," then yes, Nickelback and Kanye West look like fucking geniuses.
As an experiment, I've tried introducing OCR tunes to a number of my students, and I find that very frequently their reaction depends on who's around. When I have one girl over by the stereo and the rest are over at the bars on the other side of the gym, they'll say some of these mixes are the coolest music they've ever heard -- I have a number of girls doing floor routines to remixes this season.
But if I play the same tune for them when all their friends are around, they'll say they don't like it and ask me to put on some Jonas Brothers or Coldplay or some other shit like that.
To me, this demonstrates that, at least for some people, it genuinely isn't about the music at all -- it's about listening to something their friends think is cool. And the funny thing is they don't even realize they're doing this most of the time. It's subconcious, reflexive even.
I'd say my biggest objection to contemporary pop (especially hip-hop) is that it usually has about two seconds of actual music written for the whole song. Where a (forgive my elitism) realcomposer might come up with a short riff and think "this is a good start, I could develop this into a full song," a typical pop producer would say "I'm done. Loop it for five minutes and we'll call it a song."