I think that the public judges a song on the overall feel, not individual samples. If a sample contributes too heavily to the song, and the sample is… - Andrew Sega

One of the issues these days is the sheer amount of music out there to be listened to. There are more bands than one could ever hope to explore.

I think there are some objective [musical] qualities... how complex something is, how melodic, how diverse the tonality is, et cetera. But I could also make a piece of music that contains all of those and yet isn't "good" from a subjective viewpoint. For example, take Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata", Beatles "Yesterday", and Underworld's "Born Slippy", and play them all on top of each other at the same time. Great music in their own right, but terrible sounding together.

I've been fascinated with arcane chord progressions since I was young. The trick is to keep them interesting, while still in the realm of 'normality' (otherwise the listener has no context to appreciate the progressions in).