Why Not Everyone Will Love Your Music (And Why That's Actually a Good Sign)
By Written by Peter McVeigh
I've never been "cool" as a musician. I write and record pop/rock music. Radio has been supportive, fellow singer-songwriters have been generous, and the audience has grown. But plenty of musicians in bands, most of which no longer exist, spent years looking down at what I was doing. It took me longer than it should have to realise that the contempt itself was a signal. This article will show you exactly why criticism, dismissal, and musical snobbery are not problems to manage. They are evidence that your music is doing its job.
If Nobody Dislikes Your Music, You Haven't Said Anything
Music that offends no one moves no one. That is not an opinion. That is the entire history of the medium playing itself back at you.
Every artist who built a lasting audience did so by making a specific kind of person feel something specific. The direct consequence of that is that a different kind of person feels nothing, or feels annoyed, or feels actively hostile. You cannot have one without the other. The specificity that creates a devoted listener is the same specificity that irritates someone else.
Think about what dealing with criticism as a musician actually means in practice. The criticism is almost never about craft. It is almost never "the mix is slightly bright in the upper mids." It is "I don't get it," or "that's not real music," or the version delivered without words at all, which is the musician in the corner of the room who won't make eye contact. That is not a technical assessment. That is a personal response to something that cut across their own sense of identity and taste.
And taste is the point. Music operates differently to almost every other art form because people use it to define who they are. It sits inside people's ideas of themselves. The teenager who had a formative experience with a specific record will defend that record with a ferocity that has nothing to do with production quality. The band musician who spent ten years in rehearsal rooms building a particular kind of credibility will be genuinely threatened by a solo artist with a laptop and a Radio 2 playlist. The reaction is emotional, not rational.
That is not a problem for your career. That is proof that music still matters.
Do this: the next time someone dismisses your work, ask yourself honestly whether their genre, identity, or career trajectory conflicts with what you represent. If the answer is yes, the dismissal is not feedback. File it accordingly and move on.
I had a friend say to me about a song I wrote 'We Don't Believe you' That I don't like it, the music is too upbeat for what the song is about. I totally understand why they thought that. But that was exactly what I was trying to achieve, I wanted to hook people in with this upbeat feeling song then hit them in the gut with the lyric "While those Children wash ashore"
Have a listen to the track and let me know what you think of it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiIBBpVDZHs&list=RDNiIBBpVDZHs&start_radio=1
Why Other Musicians Are Often the Worst Judges of Your Work
Musicians are not your audience. This sounds obvious until you start playing in rooms full of them and forgetting it entirely.
The musician-to-musician hierarchy is one of the most persistent and least useful structures in the industry. It rewards certain aesthetics, certain formats, and certain histories, and it punishes others with a consistency that has almost no relationship to commercial reality or audience connection. The band musician who looks through you at a networking event, the producer who is politely condescending about your songwriting process, the session player who sniffs at the production choices you made on your last record. These people are not your market. They never were.
Here is the specific version of this that plays out repeatedly. A solo pop/rock artist builds a genuine following, gets regional radio support, has real listener numbers, and is sustaining a career. Meanwhile, a four-piece band with more critical credibility plays to 40 people on a Thursday and calls it a support slot. The credibility hierarchy says the band is doing it properly. The commercial reality says something different entirely.
This is not an argument against bands, or guitar music, or critical credibility. Some of the most important music ever made has come from artists who were ignored commercially for years. The argument is specifically about who you take feedback from and why.
Feedback from your audience is data. Feedback from radio producers, sync supervisors, playlist curators, or music supervisors is data. Feedback from a musician who does not make the kind of music you make and does not share your audience is noise. It may be sincere, it may even occasionally be technically correct, but it is not information you can act on in a way that improves your career.
The real number that matters here is not how many musicians respect you. It is what Spotify for Artists shows you about monthly listeners, skip rates on individual tracks, and where your listeners are coming from. That is your actual feedback loop.
Snobbery Has a Shorter Career Lifespan Than You Think
Most of the bands that looked down at you are no longer together. You probably already knew that.
That is not a cheap point. It is worth sitting with because it tells you something structural about how music careers actually work. Credibility without audience is not a career. It is a position. And positions, unlike careers, have no revenue attached to them.
The music industry has a remarkably consistent pattern here. Artists and acts who build genuine connections with real listeners, even in genres that attract critical eye-rolls, tend to outlast the critical consensus that dismissed them. Robbie Williams was famously written off by the music press throughout the late 1990s and 2000s, yet shifted over 75 million records globally. The critical establishment's view of him never came close to predicting his commercial reality.
You do not need to be Robbie Williams to apply this logic. A songwriter with 15,000 genuine monthly Spotify listeners, a regional radio relationship, and a live circuit that covers its own costs is doing better than the vast majority of acts that receive more column inches. Spotify's own internal research has consistently shown that listener retention and repeat plays are stronger predictors of long-term streaming growth than playlist placement alone. An artist with a small, loyal audience outperforms a viral spike with no follow-through every single time.
The bands that dismissed you were, in many cases, protecting a sense of identity that their music alone could not sustain. That is a human response and it is worth being generous about it. But it is not a verdict on your work.
Do this: audit your genuine audience metrics annually. Monthly listeners, email list open rates, merchandise conversion, show capacity against tickets sold. Those numbers are your actual standing in the industry. Put them somewhere you can see them when the noise gets loud.
The Counter-Argument: What If the Criticism Is Right
There is a version of this where the critics have a point. It is important to be honest about that version before dismissing it.
If you are receiving consistent, specific, technical criticism from people who work in your genre and know your audience, that is different information to generalised snobbery. A radio plugger who tells you the chorus does not arrive early enough is not dismissing you. A sync supervisor who says the production feels dated for the brief is not putting you down. A manager who tells you the live show needs structural work before a particular tour is not being contemptuous. These are professionals with skin in the game giving you actionable intelligence.
The distinction between snobbery and legitimate critique comes down to specificity and stakes. Legitimate critique is specific. It names the problem and it is given by someone who has a reason to want you to improve because your improvement benefits them too. Snobbery is general. It does not give you a next step. It only tells you about the taste and identity of the person delivering it.
The failure mode here is conflating the two and either dismissing all criticism as snobbery or accepting all dismissal as truth. Both are costly errors. The first leaves you unable to improve. The second leaves you chasing approval from people who will never give it because your success would require them to revise their own position.
A useful test: could you act on this feedback tomorrow in a way that would improve your music or your career? If yes, it is critique. If no, it is opinion. Opinion is fine. It is allowed to exist. You do not have to carry it with you.
What Strong Opinions About Music Actually Tell You
The reason people fight about music is the same reason music matters. These are not separate facts.
Music is one of the few cultural products that people use as a direct expression of self. The genre someone identifies with in their teens frequently stays with them for life, not because they stopped developing, but because that music was present at a formative moment and the attachment is emotional rather than analytical. Research published by the British Phonographic Industry consistently shows that music consumption in the UK is among the highest per capita in the world, precisely because of this depth of personal investment.
That investment is why opinions about music are so fierce. Someone telling you your pop/rock record is not real music is not commenting on your craft. They are defending the music that helped build their identity. That is a compliment to what music can do, even if it does not feel like one in the moment.
For you as an artist, this means the intensity of the reaction to your work is more useful information than its direction. An artist who provokes strong dislike from a particular group of listeners whilst building fierce loyalty in another group is in a far stronger position than an artist who generates mild indifference across the board. Mild indifference does not fill rooms. It does not build email lists. It does not translate into sync deals, repeat ticket buyers, or word-of-mouth growth.
The goal is not universal approval. The goal is depth of connection with the right people.
Radio support is one of the clearest signals that your music is connecting. If regional and national radio programmers are playing your records, they are telling you that a real, measurable audience exists for what you are making. That audience's opinion is the one your career is built on.
How to Handle Backstabbing and Dismissal Without Losing Your Focus
The practical problem with dealing with criticism as a musician is not the big, visible dismissals. Those are relatively easy to process. The harder version is the low-level background noise: the musician who talks you down to a venue contact, the artist who subtly undermines you in a shared green room, the industry figure who is politely helpful to your face and dismissive behind your back.
This happens. It has always happened. It is not specific to your genre or your career stage. It is a feature of any industry where there are more people competing for attention than there are positions available.
A few specific, practical ways to deal with it:
Do not respond in kind. The temptation to match dismissal with dismissal is real and it is almost always a mistake. It puts you in a frame where you are reacting to someone else's narrative about your work rather than building your own. Every minute you spend defending your credibility to someone who has already decided not to give it is a minute you are not spending on your actual audience.
Protect your creative environment. The people in your close working circle, your producer, your manager, your co-writers, your touring band, should be people who are invested in your work and honest about it in the specific, useful way described in the previous section. If someone in that circle is consistently undermining your confidence without offering actionable improvement, they are a cost to your career, not an asset.
Build your external record. Radio credits, sync placements, live booking history, streaming growth, press coverage, label interest. These are not just business metrics. They are your answer to every piece of snobbery you will ever encounter, and you do not need to say a word. Your career says it for you.
Keep a short list of mentors or peers whose specific, experienced opinion you trust. When the noise gets loud, go to that list. Not social media. Not the room full of musicians who have a stake in your position. The two or three people who know your work and want it to succeed.
What This Means for Your Career Strategy
If the argument above is correct, and it is, then it has direct implications for how you build your career and who you build it with.
Stop seeking approval from people who are not your audience. This sounds simple. It is not simple to practise because the music industry is full of rooms where approval from other musicians feels like the only currency that matters. It is not. The only currency that matters is the one your actual listeners spend on you: their time, their attention, their ticket purchases, their streams, their loyalty.
Invest in the relationships that feed your audience, not your ego. A regional radio producer who champions your records is worth more to your career than every musician who respects your credibility. A sync supervisor who puts your track in a TV brief is worth more than a hundred approving nods from the critical establishment. A booking agent who believes in your live show and can grow your circuit is worth more than the admiration of acts who cannot fill the same rooms.
Build your team accordingly. Your manager, if you have one, should understand your audience and your genre. Commission structures typically sit between 15% and 20% of gross income in the UK, with some managers working net on certain income streams. That is a meaningful percentage of your earnings. The person taking it should be working towards your actual audience, not the audience they wish you had.
The artists who last are not always the ones who received the most critical validation. They are the ones who found their specific audience, served it consistently, and refused to let the noise from outside that relationship redirect their energy. That is not a romantic idea. It is the observable pattern of careers that sustain themselves over decades.
Your music will not be for everyone. That is not a problem. That is the whole point.