It's not as easy as that. You can pander to the audience, but you can't cynically pander to the audience. If you dig a little deeper into the KLF's story, you learn that they were actually trying to make a good song, then when they found the hook and realized it was totally pop, they nudged it into the direction of parody. It did far better than they thought it would, which actively pissed them off: they've since burned money as art, routinely tell the press to fuck off, etc. It really annoyed them that their more cerebral stuff didn't catch on, so they wove it into their mainstream shit. If you listen to "The White Room" as a joke on the audience it gains several levels of appreciation:

Thomas Kinkade believed in what he was doing. So does Stephanie Meyer.

Doug Preston once shared with me the inception of the Pendergast series. His buddy Lincoln Child was editing at some big house, mostly responsible for making schlock crime books readable. Doug was writing copy for the Metropolitan Museum of Natural History. They were drinking one night and Lincoln said "we can do this! All we have to do is stick to the tired formulas these guys are using and just do it a little bit better!" From whence came Relic, Reliquary, the rest of the Pendergast series and all of the Jack Reacher novels. But I never once got the impression that Doug wasn't quite proud of Pendergast. It's some fun stuff.