> How so? Because many pop musicians are successful without “knowledge and skill in music” as it was defined at the time. I would push “pop music” even further

> How so? Because many pop musicians are successful without “knowledge and skill in music” as it was defined at the time. I would push “pop music” even further back to traditional folk music, which has rarely been appreciated by professionals. Though, I guess commercial pop really took off with the invention of the phonograph. > Still, there are some things that almost everybody agrees are better than some other things. For example, someone singing out of tune, or a beginner playing the violin. Put it into a loop, add some other loops, I can work with that. The main problem with poor music performance is the lack of consistency, not the quality of the sound itself. I remember when rock came out, and the old people all said it sounded horrible, who would want to listen to the screeches and distortions of electric guitars. We now have simultaneous islands of knowledge and skill of music. Most successful musicians specialize in a particular genre, and nobody has time to be skilled at all the popular genres, both composition and performance. Then each genre has a tendency to ossify and split, as young people take music in a new direction, and the old practitioners say, that’s not our music. Rock music split off from jazz. In the old days, jazz was rebellious music associated with African Americans. Now, the local community college teaches jazz classes. Amusingly, the freeform jazz musicians there are old white men, and the young African American man teaches a rigid formal version of jazz. When the teachers put on the end-of-semester concerts, the old white men let their students play, but the African American hires professionals from out of state to do the solos. So, no, you can’t extract a category of people ”who are knowledgeable about and skilled in music themselves” to be an arbiter of taste.