You think you have taste. You picked these songs. But pull the credits on a decade of pop number ones and the same small circle of names keeps showing up behind the glass.
Max Martin alone has more Hot 100 number ones than almost anyone in history, trailing only Lennon and McCartney. He rarely sings a note. His collaborators, a small Stockholm-adjacent circle plus a few American writers, quietly fill out most of the rest of the list.
The concentration is the whole story. A genre that sells itself on personality and self-expression runs, underneath, on a tiny shared toolkit of hooks and chord moves, with the same producers rotating between artists who are marketed to you as rivals.
Follow one name and the walls between stars fall away. Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, The Weeknd, and Ariana Grande are sold to you as separate universes, yet the same producer has a hand in the biggest hits of all of them.
It also takes more hands than it used to. The average number one now carries around five credited songwriters, up from fewer than two a generation ago, as samples, interpolations, and full writing camps pile names onto every track.
None of which makes the songs worse. It just means the person with the taste might be a producer you have never heard of.