Subjectivity

"Music is subjective" is a layman's take#

"Music is subjective, there's no right or wrong."

That is a layman's take, even if a room full of legendary engineers all agree with it. Objective and subjective are not audio terms. They come from philosophy, specifically metaphysics, and an expert in one field is a layman in another. I don't go to my mechanic when I have a toothache.

Hiding behind "it's all subjective, so you can't tell me my mix is bad" is one of the most cringe things an engineer or musician can do. Saying music is purely subjective with no rules is just admitting you don't know what the rules are.

Some things in music are simply wrong#

If you push a lead vocal up 1 dB, some people might even prefer it; that is taste. If you push it up 20 dB, it is obviously too loud. An engineer who wasn't sure would get fired. If you pull it down50 dB, you can't even hear it anymore so it is equally incorrect.

It isn't objectively wrong in a mind-independent sense, and it isn't merely subjective either. It is intersubjective: the whole community of competent listeners perceives it broadly the same way. Music is neither purely subjective nor objective. It has shared conventions.

Professionals have subjectivity plus the rule book#

Consumers have their subjective impressions. Professionals have those plus the rule book: convention, the tricks of the trade. Whether you want to be a pro or an artist who breaks the rules, you have to know what they are first. "Learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist."

The rules can be learned, the way you learn to read facial expressions. Beginners often can't tell a good mix from a bad one because they haven't learned the shared standards yet, and someone who applies them wrongly is simply wrong. You can even take part in standards you can't articulate.

Mastering engineers and consistency#

If everything were purely taste, how could a mastering engineer consistently improve mixes without detailed instructions? The track the artist sent would already be perfect for him and the engineer wouldn't know what to do. Yet good mastering engineers improve mixes reliably, and ten decent engineers, given the same song, would produce remarkably consistent masters.

Put ten good, qualified examiners in a room to judge a performance and there will be reasonable consistency between them too. That consistency is evidence of shared standards.

"I just prefer it" is not an argument#

"I just prefer this mix" with no reasons isn't proof that taste is subjective. It is withdrawing from the conversation. The moment you give a reason, the vocal isn't present enough, the low end is muddy, you are invoking shared criteria, not describing some private inner truth.

Audio is a language game. Muddy, bright and clear have shared meanings.

The same goes the other way: a LUFS value is part of the grammar of audio engineering, not something lying around in nature. Rather than calling established practice "objective", it is more accurate to say "this is how we do things in our industry".

Telling me The Shape of Jazz to Come is a bad album is not a different opinion. It's misusing the criteria that give "good" its meaning.

I can know a record is good and hate listening to it#

Quality and enjoyment are separate things. I can listen to some very famous, very well-made pop records and recognise that they are excellent examples of their genre, recorded, mixed and mastered well, while personally finding them unbearable. Judgements of craft and significance answer to shared criteria.

Streams and awards don't measure quality#

Play counts, streams and awards tell you about popularity, not about quality or significance. A lot of high-play-count music is whack, and some of the most respected music, underground techno and experimental records, is unknown to the mainstream. What you can judge is significance: whether a record defined a genre and how influential it was. When I picked the most important album of each year, I started from the most significant, genre-defining records and narrowed them down by my personal favourites.