[taylorius]

I wasn't using the word popular as a metric - "popular music" is a fairly standard term, and is used as a category designator, to refer to music created by modern songwriters and/or bands, as opposed to say, classical music.

I must say I find it slightly hard to believe that this isn't obvious - but I hope this explanation clarifies things.

[noizejoy]

You may think it's pedantic, but in this case it's a significant distinction.

"popular music" != "pop music"

The term "popular music" is an umbrella for music that has "wide appeal" and associated with "large audiences" [0] -- i.e. it's a statistical term.

It can apply to many "genres" (that's the music industry term, rather than categories).

One of those genres[1] is "pop music"[2]. And after your clarification, I now assume your OP actually meant "pop music".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_music [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_genre [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop_music

[taylorius]

I would question the distinctions significance in the context of my original post, to be honest.

And I would not categorise Leonard Cohen as pop music, by your criterion, as it would not be useful. "Pop music" as a term used by the music industry changes it's definition along with people's musical taste. If you take the right moment in time, an extremely broad variety of music would be "pop music".