Eli5 if music is all about taste, so how we can decide is a song good or bad for award like Emmy?
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1) Music isn’t *all* about taste. Music has a whole set of rules about what “works” (i.e. sounds pleasant to the human ear) and what doesn’t. It’s possible to empirically evaluate musical skill … although if we’re talking awards, any music that has made it that far is going to already have passed the threshold for minimum musical competence. For the most part.
2) Awards are typically split into categories. Part of the reason for that is to account for taste, i.e. so you’re comparing like against like. If you were comparing a rap performance against a country ballad or a classical composition, making a decisions would be much more difficult because the tastes of people who like one genre don’t necessarily overlap with the tastes of other genre’s afficionados.
Only at the topmost awards (artist/song/record of the year)
3) Within a genre (say, within “rock”) the nominations and award decisions aren’t made by a single person, but are voted on by members of the Academy (who are all professional musicians, producers, etc.) This dilutes the importance of *individual* taste in favor of the *collective* tastes of the industry.
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