I don’t wanna defend pop music too much but “catchy” is one of those aspects of music that’s easy to immediately recognize but extremely hard to pull off. In order to be catchy a melody needs to be both wholly familiar feeling but also juuuuuust different enough to surprise our ears.

I’m not saying a generative AI couldn’t ever pull it off if you drained enough lakes to do it, but while it’s very good at producing the “familiar” it’s very very bad at producing anything “surprising”.