It depends on whose music you're listening to. I would hardly call music by Bruce Springsteen, U2, Ryan Adams, Steve Earle, etc. as shallow. It may not be to your taste, but it is certainly the music of very talented individuals. Taste is subjective, but talent is talent.
Any music that qualifies as shallow, is shallow, because record company executives are chasing the big bucks by figuring out, through marketing research, what sells, and then duplicating it a hundred times over, until that particular formula doesn't work anymore, and then searching for the next big thing, and following the same procedure again. Pretty sad, when there's a lot of unique "voices" out there, to whom people could connect, if they'd only get to hear them.