How did American pop music take over the world?

Because it’s the home of Black Americans who created, influenced, or had impacts in every contemporary genre of the last 100 years.

Because it's easily digestible garbage in a lingua franca, tacked onto a virus-like consumerist ideology and Disney ideas about love. Also, globalisation.

The blacks are responsible for rap, which is its own separate genre of brain rot.

MTV helped a great deal, I believe.

R2 Blacks are responsible for blues, jazz, rock and roll, reggae, dancehall, soul, funk, R&B, Bad Brains had a hand in shaping thrash and hardcore punk / metal, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins had a hand in shaping gothic music, the list goes on and on.

No need to be racist.

R3 American music was popular decades before MTV.

It's called "pop" as in "popular" for a reason.

Because hundreds of millions of people competing to be "the best" results in, well, the best.

If you're in a smaller country of less than 100,000,000, you can't understand.

Crikey R2, are you being clueless, obtuse, AND racist for the fun of it? Read R4 again slowly and repeatedly until it sinks in. And I think his list may even be considered incomplete by music historians.

Apparently DJ Bobo doesn’t sell well in Tenneesse.

4 years ago, Germany observed the rise of country music in Europe.

It's not really abated since.

The same way American culture took over the world overall. Having army bases in every country blasting the music and screening the movies and infecting the locals of the country with American culture.

Have you heard a lot of pop from other countries? As R1 pointed out, the Black influence on US music going back a couple of centuries made a huge impact.

About 20 years ago, I went to a concert at Lincoln Center for the music of Ivor Novello, the British composer. (He was played by Jeremy Northam in “Gosford Park”.) And while his music was nice, it just lacked that invigorating jazz influence that US music has.