BadMusic

Quora Answer : What does bad music sound like?

Nov 25, 2019

Bad music sounds like the people who make it either :

• don't care. They're just making music for some other reason, to make money, or to be famous, not because they love music for itself. Or they're going through the motions because they are now established making this kind of music, and they don't know what to do except try to make another record. It's become a "day job".
• care too much about "getting it right" and it sounds like a dead copy of someone else.

Music which is good is the opposite.

It sounds like the musician really wants to explore and play and find something that's theirs, that they can love.

Quora Answer : Is there any music that is objectively bad?

Apr 4, 2019

Sure.

Lots of music is objectively bad.

You hear it every day.

What makes music objectively bad is not a particular quality. It's not the instrument, or the particular scale, or harmonic theory (or lack thereof). It's not the skill of the player. Or lack thereof. It's not because it's made by humans or by robots or by pointing a microphone at melting ice cubes. It doesn't matter if it was made in the 18th century or the 21st. Or the 4th.

What makes music objectively bad is that the people who made it have no sense of adventure and joy and curiosity when they made it. They made it because they thought they had to make it like this ... because rules. And they couldn't see beyond following the rules.

Music is good when it is a voyage of discovery for the artist.

And bad when it's just a chore.