What is good music?

What is good music? That’s a question I’ve been asking a lot lately. It’s actually kind of been driving me a little crazy. Who has the right to determine the quality of music? And what do we mean when we say whether something is good or bad?

Music is such a subjective experience that it’s almost impossible to actually measure its quality. Yet we still all get into arguments with our friends about whether a new album is good, whether an artist absolutely sucks, or whether they’re the best musician we can think of.

I know for a fact that good and bad music exists. Like, even if you don’t like The Beatles, you know they’re still good (I hope). So where does that line get drawn? What even is good music? 

An artist whom I have been returning to while considering this is Taylor Swift.  I don’t like Taylor Swift. The music she is currently putting out just doesn’t resonate with me. At one point, I even made the mistake of referring to her music as the “Shein” of the music industry—a comment that almost got me strangled by some of my friends. But it also got me thinking about the concept of good music. 

Taylor Swift has MILLIONS of fans. Like, millions. So, obviously, she’s doing something right. Just in my opinion, what she’s doing isn’t “good”. But to her endless number of fans, she is very good. And I’m happy that they feel that way. They care. But is Taylor Swift a good musician? 

I mean… yeah. She has to be right? But that makes me wonder, what makes a musician good? 

Lydia Night! Lydia is a musician I prize as one of the most talented artists I know, and another great example to help me work through this. I absolutely hate her new album. I really, really do not like it.  But I don’t think I have the right to declare it objectively bad. A lot of people love it. It just doesn’t exist in my little world of things I love or…consider good.

One Direction is another band I’ve been considering. One Direction was my first concert, and the first band I ever really got into. I was four when I started listening to them. And to little four-year-old Elli, One Direction was everything. 

Now, 16 years later, my music taste is quite different from when I was four (obviously). But I still love One Direction, and I highly doubt I would feel that way towards them if they weren’t such a pivotal part of my childhood.

If One Direction came to the scene for the first time tomorrow, they probably wouldn’t make their way into my music rotation. I love them today because of the way I loved them 10 years ago. Which is why I think it’s more about the connection we make with the music, rather than its intrinsic quality. 

Now, if I were to open GarageBand and grab some instruments, randomly create some progressions, and just throw them together without any thought or consideration, that would be bad. I think we can all agree that that would be bad. Not because of genre, popularity, or complexity, but because there was no true intent behind it. 

So all of this has led me to believe that maybe true, all-encompassing, good music comes simply from passion. I think that if music comes from a place of passionate intent or provokes passion through its creation, it can be considered good. Because it was good enough to matter to someone. 

But this is confusing. I don’t think every politician is “good”, simply because they have supporters. Definitely not. 

But this is music. And with music, emotion comes before logic. Because of this, I think that “goodness” could probably be measured by passion. I do think it’s important to recognize that there are different levels of understanding, though. Not necessarily better or worse taste, but different relationships with music. 

My friend, who’s in a band and has been obsessed with music since they were a conscious child, probably engages with music differently than my other friend, who mostly uses it as background noise to get from one place to another. One isn’t necessarily better than the other; they’re just different. 

You don’t have to be in a band, understand music theory, and read music literature in your free time to have good taste in music. You just need to care. I think we all live on our own little planet of good and bad music. Some planets have a lot more going on than others, but that doesn’t make the other planets bad planets. 

I guess what I’m really trying to get at here is we all have our own ways to go about loving music. And because of that, there are endless definitions of “good music”. Maybe music is only truly “bad” when there’s no real feeling or intention behind it. 

So to those of you who have Taylor at the top of your wrapped every year, keep doing that. She matters to you. And that’s kind of the whole point.