[Cavernio]

"On the other extreme, you have pretentious, elitist, music snobs who are so close-minded when it comes to music. To them, anything mainstream is worthless. They rarely even bother to give it a chance - and oftentimes INTENTIONALLY seek out to find/listen to musicians that very little people are aware of."

Not 'giving mainstream music a chance' isn't necessarily bad. Firstly, even me when I'm being a hermit, I still manage to get bombarded by mainstream music. I hear it, ergo I am forced to give it a chance. Secondly, even if I like it, a lot of music grows old. I'm certain this happens to everyone. To me, the more I hear the song is strongly related to how soon it will get 'old' to my ears. This means that even if I like mainstream music, it has a good chance of growing old without me ever intentionally listening to it. Lastly, if people never sought out non-mainstream music purposefully, well, we'd have no new mainstream music.

On an aside, I think that beyond all the cultural aspect of music, I really think you will rarely have a mainstream piece of music not be catchy. If we could somehow define 'catchiness', I think we would also find that we would find that the catchiest songs also get old the quickest. I did read a psychology study done in the 1920's regarding how much enjoyment people got out of classical versus pop (the study talked about it as pop, but they did refer to it as jazz at some points.) I don't remember the details, but after each listen to either classical or pop song(s), which I'm presuming the participants hadn't heard at all before, they rated how much they liked it. The peak of enjoyment to the jazz song happened after only a few listens, while the very last time the people heard the classical song was the most enoyment they had of it, implying that even further listens would make them like it more.