Again look at the numbers. You don’t need to have mass appeal to have a large audience. And no, sadly, Lady Gaga is way more popular than Beethoven, for the exact same reasons that you are willfully ignoring. There’s a lot more that goes into it than “performances”. Actually the exact reason you listed as “even though” is why you’re 100% wrong on this front. The people on the street are the ones that decide what’s popular, and the people on the street listen to Gaga a lot and Beethoven never, Gaga is more popular.
Plot is story, it’s not an abstraction. Language is a tool to deliver plot.
And the first sentence of Finnegans Wake is typical stupid drunken Joycian garbage. No it doesn’t send a chill down my spine, it makes me ask “what the #$%^ is this idiot blathering on about”. The language is pointless authorial masturbation, flowery junk serving no purpose other than to be flowery junk. The only people that read that and like it are literati, the other 99.5% of the popular read it and go find something else to read.
Which writer is more popular than Shakespeare? Worldwide. (And no The Bible doesn’t count). According to the Index Translationum, Shakespeare is the third most translated writer in the world (after Agatha Christie and Jules Verne). His influence on the Western World obviously towers over Christie and Verne (as much as I like the latter).
Go somewhere in Asia or Africa to ask around - they don’t have a clue who Lady Gaga is but they probably know who Beethoven is. You’re confusing Mass Media saturation with popularity. In actuality, James Joyce is huge with the latter day inner-city ghetto. Gertrude Stein is big in the Barrio. (The last couple of sentences were jokes.)