You don’t care what a professor at Juilliard thinks about music because you’re not serious about music. It’s okay to admit that. A huge majority of people think they’re serious about music but they’re not. Just like most people prefer Big Macs to haute cuisine or Harry Potter to Ulysses, a majority of people prefer easily digestible pop music to, for example, complex orchestral works.

Pick an average person off the street and they wouldn’t be able to identify the oboe in a symphony or know how many octaves there are on a piano. The vast majority of people can’t read music. Just as we defer to the greater knowledge of experts in physics or medicine or law when we ourselves aren’t experts in that field, people educated in music deserve greater respect than people who aren’t. Their opinions matter more.

You can continue to live in bizarro world where everything is subjective, but that just makes you an ignoramus.