Sometimes, Bad Is Bad

Over at Nautilus, we find blogger Jim Davies writing about a study in which people were examined on what factors influenced their opinion of whether or not songs were "good" or "bad."

One of those factors, interestingly enough, is how often the song had already been downloaded. In other words, if people thought that a song had been selected by more people than themselves, they considered it a better song. That same factor influenced them even when the researchers cheated and artificially inflated the numbers for songs that had not been frequently downloaded. So in other words, if I like crappy music, it's not my fault. It's everybody else's fault who liked it first.

I can live with that.