People defend their music preferences like it was a conscious decision or a mystical or divine revelation, like God came down from the heavens and told them "this is the music you should listen to".
The fact is that studies show most people developed their music taste in their teen years as a way of being accepted in a social group. If you were lucky, you selected a group with a good music taste, if not; you probably spend your whole life wrongly believing you were listening to music masterpieces when in fact you were not. But if you were even luckier, you took music courses as a child or teenager and therefore made a conscious and educated decision, because music education made it clear to you that in order to be considered good certain music elements (harmonies, melodies, rhythm, tone) must be present and well developed in a music piece.
Yes, there is bad and good music. And some music styles are by its nature better than others. Good music taste, like any other decision in life, is mostly a matter of education; your personal preferences are irrelevant unless they are based in an educated decision. Good is good and bad is bad no matter if you like it or not. If you want to know the difference, educate yourself.
Music education for most people means that their ears will automatically reject music with lack of harmonies, simplistic and repetitive melodies and rhythm, and overuse of artificial/computer generated sounds, all things that science is discovering are not good for the mind; and something the musically educated mind always knew.
Music is food for the brain, but not all music have the same nutrition value. Music with rich harmonies, well developed melodic themes, rhythmic variations, and natural tones create neural connections in the brain that helps people in math and language development among other things. No good is done by telling people that all music have the same quality so it doesn't matter what kind of music they listen to. The goal must be to educate them, especially our youth, in order for them to choose wisely and receive the benefits of listening to good music.
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