For straight-timed pop music, think about it like the markings on a ruler. Everything is based on a doubling or halving of something else.
Pick some reference event, like how your foot would want to tap along with the song. If you listen, something in that song (perhaps the snare drum) occurs twice as frequently. Doubling again, perhaps the hi-hat. In the other direction, halving the frequency of your foot-tap might coincide with a chord change. Halving the chord changes may reveal repetitive patterns in the lyrics. Eventually big chunks of the song (verse/chorus/solo) reveal themselves to start on some 2^n number of toe taps.
My favorite example of this is "Your Love" by The Outfield. If you play it alongside an incrementing counter in binary[1], you can see how certain instruments/elements align with changes in one of the bit positions. When large runs of bits roll over to zero, that tends to coincide with important structural points in the song.
Pick some reference event, like how your foot would want to tap along with the song. If you listen, something in that song (perhaps the snare drum) occurs twice as frequently. Doubling again, perhaps the hi-hat. In the other direction, halving the frequency of your foot-tap might coincide with a chord change. Halving the chord changes may reveal repetitive patterns in the lyrics. Eventually big chunks of the song (verse/chorus/solo) reveal themselves to start on some 2^n number of toe taps.
My favorite example of this is "Your Love" by The Outfield. If you play it alongside an incrementing counter in binary[1], you can see how certain instruments/elements align with changes in one of the bit positions. When large runs of bits roll over to zero, that tends to coincide with important structural points in the song.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z0T_fop-mI