Pop songs are a lot like fortune-tellers. They work by finding a perfect balance between vagueness and specificity.
Fortune-telling is easy - let me show you by predicting how you feel right now: You are desperately in need of something. You know what or who it is, but you haven't been able to manage to figure out how to get it. All you have to do is remove the few obstacles that stand in your way.
Boom. Done. Easy. I don't have to make any connections, because you will on your own. The person listening will fill in all the details in their own mind, convincing themself that the vague description is accurate to their own life.
Pop songs, especially ones to do with relationships (~90% of them?) do the same thing as fortune-tellers. By intentionally using "you"'s in the lyrics, they make the song easy to apply to your own life. Oh, wow, I really do feel like a lonely girl living in a lonely world.
Or, my favorite example: Taylor Swift's You Belong to Me. "She wears high heels, I wear sneakers. She's cheer captain, and I'm on the bleachers." Everyone can convince themselves that they are the one wearing sneakers, sitting on the bleachers of life.
As I think about this more, this is what they call "being relatable." But I think it goes a few steps farther than that, and is worth pointing out.
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