Soldato
Just to reiterate the original point those with sense in this thread were making, even the worst examples of metal, dubstep, and Justin Bieber's entire catalogue are still music. Terrible, wrist cuttingly bad in the eyes of many, yes, but the essential thing is that it's fallacious to say something isn't music just because you don't like/get it, when it clearly is.
I still dislike most pop, ska, punk, indie and anything cheesy but it's still music, to claim otherwise would be ridiculous. Pop itself is almost always a deliberate and cynical distillation and exploitation of generally appealing chord progressions, song structures, harmonies, and 'borrowing' of facets of other genres that are currently en vogue with the yoof of today, hence the name.
I think the main problem is that because most people only ever hear what they are fed by radio/TV/the media, they aren't exposed to other well established or non-Western musical concepts and practices, so their brain farts and they just dismiss things without understanding them, at least initially.
This is why people never really make huge genre-spanning jumps when it comes to musical taste, it tends to be a slowly evolving thing, e.g. a lot of metal fans tend to get into electronic music via artists that make dark, aggressive music or tracks that resemble metal, or metal acts incorporating elements of electronic music. This then leads them off into EDM land in search of similar artists, or perhaps ones that they referenced or collaborated with, and eventually they might able to appreciate things completely removed from the original band/artist that got them into it in the first place. Agoraphobic Nosebleed to Air/Cannibal Corpse to Cannibal Ox/Emperor to Eric Johnson. The journey is half the fun!
I still dislike most pop, ska, punk, indie and anything cheesy but it's still music, to claim otherwise would be ridiculous. Pop itself is almost always a deliberate and cynical distillation and exploitation of generally appealing chord progressions, song structures, harmonies, and 'borrowing' of facets of other genres that are currently en vogue with the yoof of today, hence the name.
I think the main problem is that because most people only ever hear what they are fed by radio/TV/the media, they aren't exposed to other well established or non-Western musical concepts and practices, so their brain farts and they just dismiss things without understanding them, at least initially.
This is why people never really make huge genre-spanning jumps when it comes to musical taste, it tends to be a slowly evolving thing, e.g. a lot of metal fans tend to get into electronic music via artists that make dark, aggressive music or tracks that resemble metal, or metal acts incorporating elements of electronic music. This then leads them off into EDM land in search of similar artists, or perhaps ones that they referenced or collaborated with, and eventually they might able to appreciate things completely removed from the original band/artist that got them into it in the first place. Agoraphobic Nosebleed to Air/Cannibal Corpse to Cannibal Ox/Emperor to Eric Johnson. The journey is half the fun!