Oh, Darn. Lamarca said most of what I was going to say, and she makes my point very well. Let me see if I can say it another way. I don't know if I should attempt this approach with a Whitehead expert amongst us, but let me give it a try. He's busy learning Windows 98, so he probably won't notice...(grin)

Why does bad music sell? Well, popular music sells because it expresses the idiom of the moment. Popular music is, by nature, ephemeral. When the moment passes, most of the music of that moment will also pass away. However, from each moment, something endures.
The music that endures from those past moments is what we folk snobs call good music, but it's not only folk music that has to be sorted through this test of time. I remember music classes when I was young, when my teachers would tell us about all the awful music that came out the the production lines of Tin Pan Alley, and later from the Brill Building. My teachers were right. A lot of awful music came out of those places. As time has gone by, we've found that a lot of good music also came from those same production lines.
Take a look at the Music for the Nation (1870-85) collection of sheet music at the Library of Congress. You'll find a lot of garbage there. There's a huge volume of music here and it covers a very short period of time, so I get the impression that the Library of Congress decided not to sort out the bad stuff. The collection at Duke University and the Levy Collection at Johns Hopkins are different - they were assembled by collectors, and I'm guessing they most probably avoided saving a lot of the bad music. I'm glad the Library of Congress has saved the bad stuff for us. As time goes on and our vision of the past becomes more objective, we may find some gems that other generations have passed by.
So, why do people buy bad music? Same reason they buy trashy books, or speak in trite phrases. That's the way life is. Even the Einsteins among us think truly original thoughts only every once in a while. The rest of the time, they speak words that have been spoken before. But every once in a while, something wonderful is created. We need to find those wonderful creations and preserve them.
But we shouldn't get too huffy about all the crap that's produced. We create a good amount of it ourselves.
-Joe Offer-