Judgement Day

You always hear stuff like, “Oh Netflix movies are so generic and done a million times” or “commercial music is so bland”. And you usually tend to agree. “Yeah, sounds about right.”

But how do we judge art? What is good art? Is it what those 10 panelists decide at an awards show, or those other ones sitting behind a screen?

The most obvious, simple, and irritating answer to a person who needs one: everyone has their own taste. We’re all tuned to a different frequency and therefore will decide on contrasting palettes to judge. It’s a fact and cannot be debated.

But this is also the most boring answer. So what’s the next best option?

Usually, those 10 panelists don’t seem qualified to judge anything. After every Academy Awards Show, those guys get a lot of hate for picking the wrong movie. Always. But the fact is, they kind of are qualified, aren't they? Theoretically, the judges should have been chosen based on how many movies they have seen, just so they have a giant sample size to compare movies to. It’s a different thing that they weren’t and they weren’t even watching the movies they were judging, but let’s put a pin in that for now. You can’t say you have seen as many movies as those theoretical judges that existed (hopefully) around 10-15 years ago. And we were trusting them that they would correctly compare these works of art fairly.

However, that pin does exist. What also exists is that humans will more often than not work towards personal gain. Humans can lie, humans can cheat, they might not tell the correct story. There is something which exists which takes a part of humans which cannot cheat. A part which cannot lie, cannot cheat, and always tells the correct story.

Numbers.

Spotify collects the streaming data of every artist, and no matter what people on Twitter say, it’s (mostly) true. If we go with the same idea that every person forms their own opinion, then if a majority of people have a common opinion, it should be the closest representation we can have to an airtight, “correct” opinion. Statistics shows that odds are, you’ll consider the opinion to be right.

So go with whichever option suits you. For now, I’d recommend the numbers game; it poses a much lower chance of you finding yourself at the bottom of the disappointment barrel (previously known as X (previously known as Twitter)).