[Modern music] sounds so samey because its sole raison d'être is to make money, as a result it is soulless commercial drivel

This is one of those irritating statements that crops us from time to time on Mudcat, quite often from someone in the traditional folk world - this time from Dick Miles, as it happens - and it's interesting to read all the fascinating conversations in this thread so far which celebrate a wide range of musical tastes and genres so positively. They give the lie to that perspective, in my view.

Why is there such snobbery about songs which are written to earn a living? Of course there are the entrepreneurs who consider music as so much cash to be earned, and they've existed in one form or another down the centuries. But it would be a mistake to consider that, just because songs are written for money, all commercial composers have no soul, no heart, no emotion or no ability to comment on the human condition. "Oh, it's just Tin Pan Alley stuff" is a typical comment - thus obliterating, with one stroke of the pen, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Dorothy Fields, Irving Berlin, Al Dubin & Harry Warren, George & Ira Gershwin, Goffin & King, Ivor Novello, Sigmund Romberg, etc., etc. Hugely witty and talented people.

What idiocy. What does it matter if a song is written to earn a crust if the song itself touches someone's heart? "Brother, Can You Spare A Dime" is a product of "Tin Pan Alley", but that song resonates with me now as much as it did when I first heard it over 60 years ago - and probably as much as it did with audiences from 1932 onwards. And it resonates far more with me than a great deal of traditional stuff - which is not to say that I don't care for traditional songs, just that there can be - for me - as much in one as in the other. Soulless commercial drivel? Not in my book.