I interact with a lot of music professionals on a daily basis, and our conversations often revolve around exchanging opinions on various works. If you were to overhear some of these conversations, you might hear something like this:

Musician 1: Can we make the low frequency dynamics of this song more gentle?

Me: Yes, if we make the low frequencies more gentle, then the mids and highs will require more support to remain steady. Are you okay with making these structural changes?

Musician 2: I have a PAD hidden in the chorus that I want to bring out a bit more. Can we do that?

Me: No problem. Do you want the whole chorus to be more integrated, or would you like to preserve some of the muddiness?

Musician 3: I think we should bury the kick drums a bit and make the bass the main line of the low-end for this song.

Me: Sure thing. Are you aiming for an "All That" feel? Do we need to keep the kick's intensity?

Musician 4: Can we make this guitar sound sweeter without adding any tails?

Me: Absolutely, right away.

……

Such conversations are playing out every day. To outsiders or people who are new to the industry, it may seem like we're speaking some highly technical jargon, or even a "black language". But that's not really the case. We're just exchanging ideas about details of music, and the basis of that exchange is that we all have our own goals for how we want the final music to sound. And when the music we hear doesn't match our expectations, we communicate with the producers to try to get the result we want.

You see, this is when two things we need to know come into play: the goal in our head, and the actual music we hear, which in some ways doesn't quite match that goal. In other words, at the very least, we need to know the following two things:

1. What should we expect from a certain piece or style of music? Or, do we have expectations? Or, after listening to the prelude, is it just the singer's voice that remains in our attention?

2. Is there any difference between the music we actually hear and the music we expect? Is it perfectly aligned or completely off the mark?

Despite these two things, most people, even most of the music production professionals, can't really understand this. For anyone who needs to communicate with music, this state is fatal. Why? Because if you need to communicate, you need to give your opinion. Those who don't know how to listen to music, being in their place, but have no really useful opinion to say, often end up in disaster. This is also why an older musician once said to me in the early days that you should leave one or two obvious flaws when making music, so that customers can listen out and have a sense of accomplishment, and won't bother you too much.

Do you want to be such a customer? Do you want to be fooled by musicians and feel proud of yourself as a customer? Or, do you want to be a customer who gets tangled up with producers and finally gets blacklisted in contacts list? Or, say, you are a music enthusiast yourself, but when you want to express your ideas about a work, you can only say: "This song is really good!", "This song is really bad!", "The lyrics of this song impressed me", "This song's melody is so beautiful!" Such nutritionless comments, to the point where after you say it, most cases will be automatically ignored.

If you don't want to be in this situation, then you need to learn to listen to music like a (professional) musician, listen to every piece of detail in the music, not just the lyrics and melody.