What is "popular culture?"

After reading the first chapter of John Storey's book Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, I realized that "popular culture" was much more difficult to define than I had initially thought. Storey outlines six different definitions of pop culture, all of which I thought were relevant and accurate, but also cumbersome due to the sheer quantity of different interpretations and potential applications. I'd like to try to create a more concise and unified definition based on my own personal experiences which might hopefully be useful to us as a class.

My first real recognition of "pop" culture as being something other than "real" culture occurred when I came to college. My freshman year hallmates loved to tease me for my horrible taste in music, since at that time the majority of the music in my collection was from pop artists like Britney Spears, NSYNC, and a multitude of other artists which I am going to decline to name for the sake of my own pride. At that point it had never occurred to me that the music I listened to was of any less worth than other types, and while I had heard plenty of other artists and styles of music, pop just tended to suit my tastes the best, so that was what I listened to. My friends quickly made it apparent, however, that my choice music was "fake", "manufactured", "juvenile", and just overall distasteful for any seemingly "cultured" person to listen to. Soon they moved on to critiquing my taste in movies, which was similarly pitiful, since romantic comedies and blockbuster adventure films apparently also do not count as "culture." Needless to say, my tastes in tv shows, plays, museums, travel destinations, and books ("Harry Potter isn't good literature??") eventually came under the same barrage of attacks, and I quickly learned to keep my entertainment choices to myself (at least until sophomore year when I decided I didn't really care what anyone else thought of my love for pop culture, and by an odd coincidence actually began to enjoy some of my forays beyond the sphere of boy bands and pop princesses).

Based on that experience, I believe that to most people, pop culture is defined by the following qualities:
1. Any medium (be it a song, book, movie, television show, etc.) which is agreeable to many, but is dismissed by the nameless "elite," and is therefore also dismissed as worthless by those who wish to be "elite" (I'm sure you know quite a few of these people...)
2. Any medium which is perceived as being produced with profit - not art or a message - as the main motivation (You often hear fans complain of artists "selling out" to the mainstream.)

While this definition is much more simplistic than Storey's, I also feel that it can be helpful in that it provides a quick litmus test when trying to decide if a particular medium is "pop" or not. If you enjoy a particular medium but feel you might be embarrassed to admit it to someone whose opinion you value and who you view as being more "cultured" than yourself, then it is probably pop.

This is by no means a rigid definition and I'm sure it excludes some media which we would all likely consider pop culture, so I'm definitely open to suggestions of how to improve! Also, as I grew up in the US, I am only really familiar with American pop culture and am not sure if this definition would apply as well to Korean popular culture. Please use the comments section to add to and refine my definition so that is it better suited to our studies of Korean pop. Thanks!