I like Taylor Swift’s music. 

There, I said it. I’m a huge fan. OK, fine, I’m one of the Swifties. 

The other day I was minding my own business doing my work while listening to music. All of a sudden, the song that was playing was broadcast across our office Bluetooth speaker. I was playing Maroon 5 at the time. Someone in the office laughingly scolded me that Maroon 5 should never again be played through those speakers. 

He was kidding, but not really. 

Generally, we don’t like it when other people don’t like what we like. We believe it’s some kind of accusation about the thing we like. Because I like Taylor Swift, I have bad taste in music and offend people who like System of a Down. 

I like Maroon 5. I like Justin Bieber too. I also like Seether, Nora en Pure, Rage Against The Machine, Marilyn Manson, Eminem, Jay-Z, Chance the Rapper, Beyonce, Bach, Robyn, Queen, Adele, Interpol, Hozier, Lizzo, Billie Eilish and a mass of other genres and artists. You can follow me on Spotify and see that this is true. 

Fans make or break an artist. Without fans, you have no one attending concerts and no one buying your music. Fans also promote you to their friends and then the group becomes a unit of fans who identify themselves via their musical interests. 

Humans like to feel like they belong to something. The most extreme example of this that I can think of is the Juggalo community. Juggalos are fans of the Insane Clown Posse. “[Juggalos come] from all walks of life — from poverty, from rich, from all religions, all colors. […] It doesn’t matter if you’re born with a silver spoon in your mouth, or a crack rock in your mouth.”[6] Juggalos have compared themselves to a family.[7][8]

It is because of this unity that we believe that things we don’t like are bad. 

That is a fundamentally flawed concept. Just because you don’t like something doesn’t make it bad. Saying this out loud and berating other people for liking something is about you and your insecurity not about them and their tastes. 

This applies beyond music. It applies to everything. Just because you don’t like onions doesn’t make onions bad. The most violent example of this throughout history is religion. We believe that religion is a zero-sum game. Yours is wrong, mine is right, ours can’t exist together. 

The more accepting we are of this basic concept, the more we’d all get along.

Different doesn’t mean bad.