Alexandra S. Levine, writing for The New York Times, said a late-1960s recording by French conductor Jean-François Paillard led to the piece's ubiquity in pop music and at events such as weddings and funerals.
[1] Ilario Colli, writing for Limelight, traces Pachelbel's influence on modern pop to the Bee Gees' 1966 single "Spicks and Specks", which has a bass line and sequence of chords nearly identical to the Canon.
[2] Suzannah Clark, a music professor at Harvard, connected the piece's resurgence in popularity to the harmonic structure, a common pattern similar to the romanesca.
The harmonies are complex, but combine into a pattern that is easily understood by the listener with the help of the canon format, a style in which the melody is staggered across multiple voices (as in "Three Blind Mice").
The repeated use of perfect fourths in the bass line, as well as its repetition, helps the listener understand and latch onto the music, and makes it easily reproducible in a variety of genres.