What really differentiates the most successful popular singers from less successful ones?

Up to now, I’ve found it necessary to defer on such issues to the tastes of my brother, who has an uncanny ability to pick which song will be number one on the charts—and who also happens to be completely tone deaf.

This combination used to strike me as odd, until I took the trouble to reason it out properly.  Then it occurred to me that the vast majority of the music-consuming public can’t tell any better than my brother can whether a singer is on-key or off-key.  They’re not evaluating the tone or timbre of singer’s voice, nor are they able to distinguish between the quality of a performer’s musicianship and the quality of the song as put down on paper.

That’s not what music is about for them. 

What it’s about is the feelings that it conveys—not only to them, but for them.  For most people, the recording artist is largely a musical proxy.  His job isn’t so much to please their aesthetic sensibilities, as to express something that they feel they have inside of them.

Once I understood this, I was able to comprehend a lot more about popular music and the uses to which it is put.

For example, I was able to finally make some sense of the meeting ritual, particularly prevalent among younger people, of asking a new acquaintance what music he or she listens to.

I had always had trouble answering this about myself—largely because my taste in music tends to cut across standard classifications, and also because I may like one or two tracks by a given performer without necessarily liking any of the rest.  I had also been somewhat mystified why anyone would attach great significance to this.

But upon realizing that I was really being asked what kinds of feelings I used proxies to project, the question became every bit as sensible and natural a part of the introduction process as ritual sniffing is among dogs.