How about this: music as an art has a trivialised position in Western culture today. The fact that we have otherwise intelligent graduates who have read Homer and Shakespeare and Dostoevsky and Joyce (and maybe even Nietzsche and Camus!) and seen Citizen Kane and 2001 but have never heard a full Beethoven symphony is downright disgraceful. Almost all popular music (rock, hip-hop, whatever) is worthless both as art and as entertainment; it is melodically impoverished, rhythmically tedious, harmonically unadventurous, timbrally and texturally boring (this despite the sophisticated technology it has in this area thanks to the work of earlier pioneers) structurally simplistic, tasteless and in general plain dull.
People who criticise Justin Beiber/One Direction/Ed Sheeran fans for buying mass produced crap instead of 'real music' like The Beatles/Led Zep/Pink Floyd/Wu-Tang Clan/Tupac/Jeff Buckley/Muse/whoever the hell passes for good around here are the worst kind of hypocrite. They are also victims of marketing - the marketing which tells them that The Beatles were genuinely great musicians, great artists even, rather than talented amateur entertainers who seemingly took a perverse pride in their lack of technical knowledge (never learning to write music, for instance). And while we are on the topic, The Beatles were neither progressive nor experimental, everything they did had been done before. They just introduced it to the insulated world of mainstream pop. I announce this, in direct opposition to a poster on the thread's first page: no popular music, whether it be written by JLS or by The Beatles, has any significant lasting value.
People with musical talent who study music will write better music than people with talent who do not. Denying this is basically an announcement of one's own stupidity, and I shan't bother defending that statement unless someone specifically requests it. And yes, some music is better than other music. Okay, you can't produce a list of works in order of 'greatness' with a numerical points system. But more broadly you can certainly compare the musical competence evident in two pieces of music. The statements 'this piece of music is good' and 'I like this piece of music' mean completely different things.
Music education in the UK is the worst of any subject with the possible exception of art (the visual arts). Far too much of the curriculum is devoted to pandering to contemporary mass-market driven taste and trivialising the music of cultures with a percussion-driven musical heritage (predominantly African) simply because drums are cheap enough that everyone in the class can have one to bang on. It needs a thorough overhaul with primacy given to the Western Classical tradition, with emphasis on the fact, unknown to many, that it is still alive-and-well thank-you-very-much. (Non-Western musics should be given dignified treatments.)
I am by no means finished, but this will do for starters. Neg away, but please accompany this with a criticism of at least one point I've made.