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[Given the shameless length to which this response grew, I'll apologize in advance to anyone willing and gracious enough to indulge the entirety of my gross pedantry.]

As ever, the continued interest of anyone to ask after my thoughts on any particular topic never fails to humble me.

To begin, I'll pen the following statement, and please remember it for later;

Don't let them trick you.

Most intriguingly, your inquiry comes at a time when a similar subject had been broached with a number of old friends of mine, with whom I'd recently had the rare pleasure of seeing again. It wasn't quite a vacation, but we ended up finding ourselves in a very relaxed atmosphere. After a bit of reminiscing, we hit on the subject of recent Hollywood movies, a handful of which not one of us had a single kind word for which to spare.

Of course, this led to the very direct question of why we found these cinematic stories so disagreeable or even disgusting in some cases, and a great deal of the shared sentiment among us seemed to originate from the lack of authenticity in such stories. No true or sincere effort to tell a story in the first place, the sale-of-product entertainment initiative having taken priority along with whatever fan-fiction self-insert writer's idealogues manifesting as whatever the hell passes for a protagonist in modern big-budget Hollywood productions these days, and indeed large-scale video game projects, causing the entirety of these cinematic ventures to be flashy but ultimately hollow experiences.

I likened such films to a sociopath having studied average human behavior and attempting to imitate as closely as possible. Yet, no matter how great their effort, even the most skilled mimicry from a sociopath won't prevent a sane person from getting the chills in their presence, even if the sane person can't perfectly explain why. I reckon the overly privileged, intentionally insular echo chamber of Hollywood generally has very little grasp on what an average person is thinking and feeling in the regular day-to-day. And while some exceptions might exist, the preponderance of massive-budgeted films that seem to wholesale miss the mark of what average audiences want to see is deeply suggestive of a tremendous and yawning creative disconnect from the innately common everyman. In fact, more and more, it seems the less budget a film is given the more creative and impactful it tends to be.

Please understand, it isn't my intention to smear or disparage Hollywood silver-spoon suckers or wealthy descendants of the entertainment industry. After all, they are but products of their environment. It's hardly their fault they haven't a clue what an average person thinks or feels, since many of them have never once had to experience any lifestyle other than their own. I intend only to highlight these characteristic barriers to empathic written storytelling in order to further illustrate a greater point. That point being, the insidious tricks and clever guile such sociopathic storytellers exploit in an attempt to coerce the average everyday audience member into a faux sense of artificial camaraderie-- but lacking at their core the essential literary sine qua non.

There are several such prestidigitation-like deceptions employed by these so-called writers to distract you from their lack of talent (cute little critters and humorous gags among them), but I've recognized one of the most commonly utilized in recent years has been a continuous reliance on so-called "pop music" in film and game soundtracks, in order to generate iterative hype and emotion from audiences. Using licensed music in a cinematic or creative project isn't inherently negative, I've simply made a note that far too many projects rely on the quality of these songs to distract from the lack of quality in their own stories. After all, there are effective ways to employ licensed music for value-added experiences, but it takes a deft hand at doing so as a creator (Arcane Season 1, Baby Driver, and O Brother Where Art Thou, et cetera). In the same vein, CGI isn't negative in-and-of itself, but its overuse or over-reliance by a film can be jarring and egregious outside the hands of a technically gifted filmmaker.

Primarily, the distraction of licensed music, particularly extremely well-made and quality licensed music, is what arouses skepticism within me whenever I hear such music in film or video game narratives. It is, I've observed, far too often an instance of stolen gravitas, with the film or game essentially copying the homework from another far more talented creator; their own work lacks true gravitas, thus they steal gravitas from elsewhere and hope we won't notice. This results in the audience believing the film or game was better than it was in reality since they heard a really great song. But it's a trick. The filmmakers or game developers didn't create that song, they are not responsible for its creative vibrancy. They did not do the work to earn your endearment, they simply took your endearment from some thing else and moved that something else into their project.

It's a sort of perverse and twisted short-hand for emotional engagement in many cases where such emotional engagement would otherwise be unmerited. And I reckon the casus belli for my extreme misgivings is the vaunted praise heaped upon certain creators for having great taste in licensed music, when they had no hand in creating such music. They don't own it, they didn't create it, they just put it in their project. It strikes me as odd and unworthy, as odd as praising fans of a sport team for the sport team's hard work and victory. If I post a song at the end of this rambling stream of consciousness, and that song speaks to you in some way, I don't deserve credit for the song's brilliance. The song was brilliant long before me, and will remain so long after I am dead and gone.

Again, this faux profundity via overreliance on licensed music doesn't occur in every instance licensed music appears, I would simply caution you to separate your endearment to such music from your regard for the external projects in which it appears. If the external project loses the majority of its narrative force absent any licensed music, the project was lackluster to begin with. These sorts of creators are shifty and crafty pliers of smoke-and mirrors, they don't deserve the praise these songs receive. The songs remain great outside their projects.

It's not my intention ruin your enjoyment for any given media with my abject schadenfreude, I just wanted to caution you and others about the exploitation of great licensed music. Whether or not a particular game or movie was the first time you heard a great song, the song is not from that movie or game, the song is great in-spite and not because of it, and the song deserves your endearment independently of such projects. 

I thus repeat; don't let them trick you.

Give credit where it's truly due, and be wary of where your endearment is most deserved in which blended creative works are concerned.

“The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.”

― Ralph Waldo Emerson