Nobody wants to watch a movie with a guy who talks through the whole thing; it ruins the cinematic experience.

But when it comes to listening to music, people act as if this behavior is completely acceptable. It’s played at a party to create background noise, or in the workplace to drown out that noise.

Isn’t there something wrong about treating music like this?

As an art, music can mix brilliant compositions with lyrics that rival the best that poetry has to offer. But how much modern music has either of these?

It doesn’t take much to see that what’s played on the radio and sold in stores is music that has been divorced from artistic quality – music that sounds okay, so long as you’re not really listening to it.

How many of today’s popular “artists” can we call musicians? Boy bands, Disney stars and the rest of our pop culture seem to be driven by nothing but marketing and promotion.

This is only becoming easier with the advancement of technology like “auto-tune,” which has helped those utterly void of talent to sell thousands of records.

Will Justin Bieber, the Jonas Brothers or Miley Cyrus still be popular music in 10 years? What about Johann Sebastian Bach, or the Beatles?

Artistic qualities resonate in their work, whether it be music or the canvas, which allows them to stand the test of time.

But these qualities are intellectual – they require more than your eyes to see or your ears to hear. It’s the difference between a person who looks at the Mona Lisa and is impressed by its importance, and a person who looks and is impressed by the qualities of the work itself.

The former isn’t really appreciating the painting as art, while the latter gets the real and rich experience.

The public’s deaf ears to artistic qualities in music haven’t gone unnoticed by everyone. Gene Weingarten won the Pulitzer for an article he wrote about Joshua Bell – a modern day violin prodigy armed with a $3.5 million violin.

On a busy street corner, Bell played some of the greatest masterpieces of all time as more than a thousand pedestrians passed him, each mistaking him for an average street musician playing generic classical music.

Where one might expect a crowd to gather, they walked by with hardly a second glance.

As far as I can tell, people are willing to accept third-rate music for two major reasons.

The first is that they don’t pay attention to music and therefore don’t develop the capacity to critique it beyond the abilities of their animalistic senses.

The second reason is even more surprising. It seems that in a culture obsessed with wider screens, larger seats and more pixels, we don’t seem to apply the same attitude to music.

I suspect that most people believe the biggest difference between different headphones is their appearance, how loud they are, or gimmicky features like noise canceling and wireless capabilities.

Yet there’s a dimension of clarity and detail in audio that gets completely overlooked by the consumer. As long as you can appreciate the difference in quality between a VHS tape and a DVD, you can appreciate the difference between a high quality audio setup and the cheap one you probably own.

Unfamiliarity with high quality audio is probably one reason people are so willing to steal music over the Internet.

If there’s no discernible difference between the downloaded song and the song on the CD, why buy the CD? It turns out that there is such a difference, and it’s a big one.

The quality of a digital recording can be roughly measured in how many kilobits per second the recording plays at. While .mp3 is the most commonly downloaded file format, mostly for its compact size, the typical .mp3 file is a mere 128 kb/s while a CD plays recordings at more than 11 times that.

Of course, you’ll never hear the difference over the $30 pair of headphones you bought at Wal-Mart, just like a Blu-ray disc wouldn’t look any better than a VHS if both were played on a $30 TV.

If you don’t pay attention to your music and you’re not equipped to listen to it, then what’s the difference between Mozart and Miley?

To the average listener, the answer is none at all. If music is an important part of your life, do yourself a favor and try getting your hands on a decent pair of Sennheiser or Grado headphones.

Listen to an album with your undivided attention and begin to experience music as an art, rather than a product.

Active participation in listening is what separates using music to escape from your life, and using music to live it.