Is there a superior genre of music?

Listening to music is one of the most enigmatic behaviours. Why people listen to music?—what is its impact on them?—what is the role of music in society today?

You will get different answers on which is the superior genre of music depending on who you are speaking with. It’s all based on opinions. Music is to be enjoyed. It shouldn’t be used to divide people at all. Also many musicians play cross genres such as rock music with a blues sound or country music with a pop sound, just to name a few. So, the lines between many genres are blurred.

It turns out that people who judge a certain type of music as inferior to another, such as pop compared to classical music or country music compared to rock, usually know very little about the other type of music. They haven’t listened to a lot of the songs or artists within that genre. In other words they are in no place to pass judgment. They often form their negative opinions based on stereotypes of a few artists.

Human beings often think that if we don’t like or understand something that it’s inferior to us. Everyone has the right to prefer different types of music but that just means that other genres don’t suit their taste. Since music is a personal experience people are entitled to listen to what they want to. People have such different taste it would be impossible to come up with one standard to judge all music by. If a person finds a melody beautiful and moving or song lyrics meaningful, that’s really all that matters.
A study was conducted on what patterns of brain activity indicate if a person likes the music they are listening to. While participants heard several excerpts of music they’d never heard before, a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine allowed researchers to analyze their brain activity in the nucleus accumbens. Also the superior temporal gyrus, connected to the nucleus accumbens, is impacted by the genres of music a person listens to over a lifetime. It stores templates of music based on what the person has listened to before. So, a person who has listened to a lot of blues music is more likely to appreciate a blues song than someone hearing the blues for the first time.
Also a European Journal of Neuroscience study shows that there may be more similarities among music listeners than we might think. Researchers saw synchronization in several key brain areas, and similar brain activity patterns in different people who listen to the same music. So, when we go to a huge concert and we feel a connection with the crowd, we really may have a connection to the crowd.

So it isn’t about what type of music is best, it’s about what type of music best suits you. All music is great music to someone.

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