This December, my wife and I will reach the 20th anniversary of the night we met in the salubrious surroundings of Revolution vodka bar on Broad Street in Birmingham. We were both out on post‑Christmas get‑togethers with old schoolmates, and we ended up in the same bar on 28 December 2005.

I fell head over heels the minute I met her, and here we are, twenty years later, with two kids, a dog, and a Volvo.

But like any couple, we do argue. The first argument I can remember was on maybe date three, about whether it’s possible to say one piece of music is better than another. I thought you could, she thought not.

This debate rumbled on, and to this day, it occasionally re‑emerges at family gatherings. My point is that, as someone who has professionally composed, released, and performed music, I’m more able to analyse it in a way others can’t, and so I am better placed to critique it than the average person.

It turns out my family disagree, and I have variously been branded “ridiculous,” “pig‑headed”, and “up my own arse” by my nearest and dearest. 

They think different people prefer different music for many reasons, so it's impossible to say one song is definitively better than another. And so the most you can ever say is that you, personally, think The Beatles are better than BTS… but if a member of the BTS ARMY thinks the opposite, you can’t ever say they’re wrong.

The philosophy of aesthetics

Never one to concede defeat, I went looking for backup on this and found Artistic Merit by Malcolm Budd in the Journal of Aesthetic Education. 

Despite his terrible punctuation, I managed to get to the crux of his argument:

1. It’d be ridiculous for me to claim my one‑handed piano ditty is superior to Beethoven’s Fifth. So it’s possible to say one piece of music is better than another.
2. Any artistic work has features that are independently true (age, composition, structure, complexity, ambition, artistic intention) and that are subjective to the person experiencing it (setting, memories, personal taste).
3. To compare the quality of two pieces, you should compare the independently true features, not those dependent on individual subjectivity.
4. While there’s no precise metric - you can’t weigh a poem - within any genre of art, there will be great, good, average and bad examples. 
5. Evaluation requires expertise, perceptual ability, and other skills. Just like in Olympic diving, where specialists are needed to tell the difference between a 9.5 and 9.4.
6. Most people lack these skills, so their judgments about whether a piece of music is good are made quickly, without the ability to evaluate fully, often based on how the music makes them feel.
7. That might sound elitist, but we’re all in elites sometimes. Most two‑year‑olds will think Baa Baa Black Sheep is a better poem than I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, but an adult’s evaluation is more relevant due to greater knowledge of poetry and language more generally.
8. Personal preference is valid, but liking is different from evaluating. And it’s perfectly possible to like things that are bad. A Leyton Orient fan could prefer watching the O’s play, but still acknowledge Liverpool’s football is far superior.
9. So, just because some people prefer Ed Sheeran’s Galway Girl to New Order’s Blue Monday, doesn’t mean we can’t say Blue Monday is better (it is).

I excitedly reported this to my family, and was shocked when they called me “a twat.”

Why taste doesn’t matter in advertising

For those of us who work in advertising, we’re the equivalent of Olympic diving judges. 

We can see the intricacies of an ad that less trained eyes can’t.

We understand its place in advertising history, what it’s similar to, and what it references. We know the category tropes and how innovative (or not) something is. 

We can see the craft and attention to detail. Sometimes we even know the people who made it, and where it sits in their oeuvre. 

We have good taste in advertising. 

The problem is that, in order to work, ads have to appeal to people with no specialist knowledge at all. 

We’re the Mercury Prize, when all that matters is the Top 40.  

Fontaines D.C. vs Oasis

Recently, I got to see two incredible gigs on successive weekends: Fontaines D.C. at Finsbury Park and Oasis’s first night at Heaton Park in Manchester. 

I loved Oasis for its cultural moment and nostalgia, but musically, Fontaines were the superior band. The intricacy and variety of Fontaines’ sound and their lyrical depth are way beyond Oasis’s one-dimensional back catalogue. 

But the overwhelming demand for Oasis’s tour proves the point: artistic merit has little to do with commercial success. The very simplicity that makes Oasis musically inferior is what makes them one of the biggest bands of all time.

The band have regularly acknowledged they aren’t the best musicians, admitting their success was as much due to attitude as it was to their tunes. 

Liam put it beautifully: “Far as I’m concerned, you can write the best record in the world, but if you look like a dickhead you might as well stick that tune up your arse. Whereas if you get a good balance, you write good tunes and you look cool, then that’s heaven.”

The danger of taste

In advertising, we have to remember we’re in the popularity game, not the artistic merit game. 

When we let our personal taste colour our judgement, we’re forgetting the eternal maxim that ‘you are not the customer’. 

Which is why I find much of the industry’s debate around craft tiresome. LinkedIn threads obsess over art direction or a tagline’s meaning. 

Two recent instances that come to mind are the Jaguar rebrand or the Kellogg’s OG OOH poster. “I don’t get it” is largely irrelevant. “I don’t like it” even less so. Or the classic: “that’s like [insert campaign from 20 years ago only the most obsessive ad geek remembers]” 

Who cares? Talent borrows, genius steals. Oasis nicked riffs left, right, and centre. That’s not to say craft and quality never matter. But only if they make the work more noticeable, interesting, entertaining, and popular with the customer.  

Anything else is self‑indulgence. And Liam would have no time for that.