Why is modern pop music today so terrible?

It may have been covered in this thread already (sorry, I didn’t read the whole thing), but even in the days when the major labels had A&R staff, some good in-house producers and the wherewithal to procure and "develop" talent, much was crap. You had to be selective. Without getting into how the record business aided in its own destruction, the labels have less control than ever. And the folks that run a lot of the businesses that deliver "content" to you are more akin to Big Data than major labels.
The music is supposed to reflect the culture. I don’t mind some neo-soul or even some rap, but most of it is dreck- over using auto-tune for that phasey vocal effect might have been cool on one or two tracks, but it became as common as drum machines in the ’80s, or gated reverb.
There’s still cool stuff out there by new bands, but given how fragmented everything is--you have to dig. Yes, there are singers like Adele (whose only recording I bought sounded terrible) and others who are superstars that have some talent (Lady Gaga is talented, I’m not that "into" her).
A workman here the other day asked about what I listened to when he saw all the records. He told me he liked punk. I haven’t listened to any new punk bands lately, but recommended the great Bad Brains album "I Against I."
I think our taste often reflects what we grew up with.

@bdp24 - for the "record," I never referred to some of the Brill Building writers as "dreck." I did say a lot of pop even in the '60s was crap. "Dreck" I reserved for a lot of what's popular today. My point was separating the wheat from the chaff, then as today.
I also consider songwriters and music publishing to be separate from the record industry, but perhaps that's being hyper technical about how the industry worked. 

@bdp24 - Yeah, I realized that later, when i saw that someone else had used "dreck" as a term of art. Hell, I’ll listen to stupid stuff too sometimes: I dig that song by the Spiral Starecase, I dig some Crystal Gayle, but at the same time I may switch to Starker playing Kodaly or Krokodil’s "An Invisible World Revealed." Taste is a funny thing. I can listen to a song or two from Gnarls Barkley or Ludacris/Outkast, but a steady diet of that would probably leave me undernourished. Everybody has their guilty pleasures- mine, for the last few years, has been lost bands and albums from Europe in the late ’60s and early ’70s. (Blast Furnace-s/t is a current favorite).
Yeah, there’s a lot of crap all over the place. Food, music, name your poison. That may be someone else’s joy, though, so I’m not too harsh about what I consider shitty music, I just don’t listen to it.
One thing I will say: we all get into our trenches and stay there. I have had certain limits over the years with free-form jazz and I’m now beginning to appreciate some angles of it. Part of it is purely ignorance on my part too.
Now that I’m in Austin, I see and hear talent ever day-- these people can’t really make a living at it, but they do it anyway. Who knows in that great lottery of popular culture where the wheel next stops? A ’bad’ era can begat another renaissance. Call me an eternal optimist. 
I did miss the opportunity to hear The Village People at a club some friends own, but I would have gone purely for the experience of it, not because I was ever a fan. Crimson on the other hand,....