re: Does The Average Person Have Poor Music Taste?

Here is the issue: It takes a lot of time and effort to sample all of the different wines, and when you try a wine that really hits you as being truly epic and transcendent, you want to repeat that experience so that it carves itself into your memory and basically becomes almost a part of your self-identity. You want to take the time to truly understand every characteristic and understand what makes it great. You may sample every award-winning wine in a tour of the Napa Valley, but after that experience are they not going to all kind of blur together into an undefined, abstract collage of unmemorable wines?

I have a real problem with people telling me that I must have a poor taste in music just because I don't know a particular band or artist. It's about quality not quantity.

There's just so much volume out there right now and different avenues for being exposed to music that I'm afraid some stuff gets called "great" that's actually just rehashed or re-excavated from the shallows or depths of music's historical ocean, while at the same time there may be truly original or groundbreaking stuff that get diluted in the constant barrage of wave after wave of "newness." We have become the filter that was once the labels, which is great, but comes with more responsibility.

You have to be careful.

I understand your sentiment, but simply not being exposed - or simply a desire to allow greatness to set in - doesn't constitute poor taste (the opposite for the latter.) We have to remember, there was a time when music wasn't so easily available. You had to physically go to the record store, usually commit to ONE album that would get you through a month or two or longer, and allow yourself to be immersed in that album. That immersion process doesn't happen any longer, and I don't think it can happen as quickly or in such a "multi-tasked" manner as music is absorbed today. JMO.