I have started and scrapped this comment about 5 times now trying to figure out exactly how to say all this so I'm just going to fucking vomit this all out:

1 as much as it pains me to say this he's um, not technically wrong. Women, as a group, do tend to be larger consumers of pop music than of rock (one source example: http://musicmachinery.com/2014/02/10/gender-specific-listening/). The pain in saying this comes from my own specific musical tastes not skewing this direction which leads me to point

2 saying that this can't be true because I prefer rock/ jazz/ lions mating is strictly anecdotal and really adds nothing relevant to the conversation. Not that your musical taste is uninteresting- hell I'd really rather this thread had gone in the direction of "hey have you guys heard of {insert artist} because they fucking rock my world!" But that doesn't make it relevant, blech.

3 please please please stop saying that pop music = popular music. While the name "pop" did originate to describe a style of rock that was becoming increasingly popular this was in like, the 50's. Today pop is a readily identifiable genre of music in and of itself regardless of its popularity. It is crafted and produced to appeal to the masses and be danceable however it doesn't always work and there is a decent amount of pop music that is not actually popular.

4 When it comes to the top 40 we do all realize that the reason those songs are on the top 40 is because American Top 40 decides so, right? And the American Top 40 is determined by Mediabase which is a division of iHeartMedia which owns the stations, but more importantly the programming direction, that decide what songs they want to play and how often they get played. While there are absolutely songs that more organically rise to the top of the charts the majority of the top 40 are decided for us.