I think there's a bit of cross- purposes regarding the meaning of the word "standards". Some people are taking it to mean an externally- imposed way of doing things, others a bit more like "Mrs Bucket's housekeeping standards are very high". Who decides what the standards are? In Mrs Bucket's case it's the neighbours, in other cases it might by Comhltas competition adjudicators. But are the adjudicators right? Dick Greenhaus suggested that the market is an objective criterion. Is the market undistorted? If you can make 50 million quid from one kind of music, and a pint of bitter and a plate of tater hash from another sort, is the first sort intrinsically better? What do we even mean by better?

I get thoroughly bored by some musicians who never seem to learn anything new, but the punters in the pub definitely prefer their repetitive, unadventurous, poorly- delivered, but familiar stuff, in a familiar format, to any amount of well- played music of a type they see as alien, judging by their reactions.