These music charts do not reflect everyone. It's basically a number of established corporations who report to one source about which songs are played the most, requested or sold. This info is collected and forms a chart that we're presented. Billboard does one. Rolling Stone does another. So does CMJ, Gavin and many other music magazines. And no two magazines ever have the same, identical charts.
Most magazines that have record charts, or any corporation that tracks or sells music, will use a basic age demographic from 14-25. Somewhere, a few people decided this was the only market worth focusing on since they thought these were the people who bought the most music. Because of that, new acts are made with the formula to please the younger artist and nothing else. That adds to the reason as to why people are subjected to the same amount of mediocre music. On top of that, the amount of brainwashing (errr, I mean marketing) spent to get their records played every hour on the hour on most commercial radio & video stations, plus aggressive web campaigns to constantly shove the faces of their artists, makes it very easy for that age group to get into what they're selling.
It's an easy market to manipulate because nobody at that age really knows what goes on behind the scenes at MTV, BET, VH-1, (which happen to be owned by the same network) or any of these established music companies. The majority of young viewers will blindly accept what's told to them because the music industry creates an elaborate scheme to protray itself as if it really was people their own age telling them what's hot and the young consumer attaches themselves to that visual. That makes it very difficult for any real artists with real talent to shine. They can only post a website or two and get a few postings on messageboards and it would take them hours to do it. The majors can do all of this in 5 minutes, repeatedly, for 5 days just on a record that constantly says, "Now, Walk It Out!" and embed it permanently into the minds of the sheep.
You really start learning more about music as you get older. When I was in high school, I used to grab that free copy of the Billboard Top 100 at Tower Records and love being able to highlight how many records I owned off of it. Once I started doing college radio, I started to see so many artists that deserved airplay and sales who never made it mainstream. That's when I started to learn that there was a lot more good music out there then what was presented and I started digging. And the more I dug, the more I started to lose my taste for commercial po(o)p. Ironically, this all started when I was in my 20s, the same exact age range where labels and corporate stations don't even value your opinion as a real statistic. Coincidence?
Best thing to do is always listen to what you like and make your own decisions about music. Don't let any of these magazines or video stations brainwash you into liking music that they market. It shouldn't take more than 5 seconds for you to realize if you like a record or not. Even if it's blinged up to be the best record on the planet, don't just accept it because it's being told to you it's the number one single right now that's sweeping the nation. And that's when music starts to get fun again.
OK. I'll step off my soap box now. Time to go listen to some Techno.
