I like more music now than I used to. For a long time I had a pretty specific thing I liked, as far as production, engineering, and certain skill sets within musicianship. Quite a lot of stuff falls outside that narrow range. I still "like what I like" the best, but a neat thing came out of a crappy thing that helped me appreciate, and ultimately like, more music.
Christian music has gotten so god-awful (swidt?) crappy in the past decade+...I mean really new levels of repetitive, redundant, monotonous sameness. There's literally two songs in modern praise and worship music, the fast one and the slow one. Bro-country falls into this category too, and I work next to a girl who plays bro-country all day, I believe it is grounds for aggravated assault. It drives me so crazy that now I like to listen to a lot of stuff that I used to be meh about, just because it's not that, and it's really interesting by comparison.
So for example, driving home yesterday Paul McCartney's Live and Let Die came on, and that's a song that I used to say "Cool, but not something I seek out and I'd rather change the station or play something I own." But man is it so much better than what I hear and play at church on Sundays, that I don't mind the sound is old, the drums aren't crisp, the EQ is fuzzy, the music lacks a certain polish I used to not be able to live without. Fact is, the chords are super interesting compared to the same 4 over and over and over of p&w/bro-country, and the song structure does neat things. There's a station in Beaumont that plays old CCM stuff from the 70's - 90's, a fair bit of which I used to also not like because I didn't like how the rhythm section played, or I thought some little element was lacking. Now I enjoy it, along with a lot more, just because I realize how much good stuff there is to focus on.
When it comes to enjoying music for me, perfect was probably the enemy of very good for a long time. Thanks to truly craptacular music, I'm free to like a whole lot more stuff that I used to pass on.
