OmCheeto said:
It does if it sucks.
I predict that in the next 5 million years, none of your selections will make it onto the billboard top 100,000. Unless of course cats take over the world.
Do you really take yourself that seriously if you confuse popularity with quality that much?
Though, these songs are more
lasting than most things posted here, there's a reason it's only from the last 40-odd years what's posted here. Though quality music has a less appeal in a burst, it's appeal stays more over time. No one will be listening to most of today's billboard hits in as little as three years. However Mathäus Passion, though never really popular, has endured for over 300 years with the right audience.
Also, Die Große Fuge that I included, Beethoven had this to say about the audience's inability to see it:
"
And why didn't they encore the Fugue? That alone should have been repeated! Cattle! Asses!"
In fact, even critics of those days were dumbstruck by it and at best confused, and at worst blamed it on insanity.
It took more than a century however, it took the invention of the phonograph for people to re-listen and re-listen to it until finally some critics began to see the logic and pattern between what on the surface appears as random chaos and nowadays most critics agree that it is the most ambitious, sophisticated and intricate piece he ever composed. After more than a century though.
Good music takes
time to appreciate, to re-listen to it multiple times before one can see it, like complex and brilliant physics, you have to re-read to understand it. Popular music however is designed to be able to be light and to be understood as soon as possible by the people because it's still released on commercial corporations who of course have their first responsibilities to their shareholders. I can't say I blame the, it's a free market, I however can neither say that any of that music meets the label 'one of the best songs of all times', I believe you confuse 'best' with 'most accessible', an altogether different category.
Artistic license reserves the right to draw forth it's audience. The most popular songs denote that in the charts. Top 10! Honestly, it's not all about the money. It's a feel good thing that lasts.