You're making a statement about personal preference -- clearly, you don't like mainstream "blockbuster" movies, which is fine, but "almost always garbage" doesn't tell us anything about the movies themselves; it doesn't identify any objective qualities. It only highlights your personal preference.
In short, how do you define "garbage"?
For arguments sake I'll stick with the movie thing. I wouldn't go so far as to say I hate mainstream blockbuster movies as a whole. But I'm not gonna lie and say anything recent has interested me. How do I define garbage? The quality of the writing, the quality of the acting, and directing/editing. On the whole my biggest problem with modern movies is piss poor writing, over-reliance on unconvincing CGI for large portions of the film (why build it if we can do it in post), and especially the recent trend of rebooting everything. There is 0 originality. I saw the beginning of this trend in the 90s with a lot of movies, some which I do like. But frankly I was turned off to hollywood movies years ago due to what I perceive as just plain shotty writing, and in some cases blatant attempts to insert political commentary into movies where it doesn't belong. It's a constant dumbing down I see in which I can look back at much older movies, a lot of them from a time before I was even born and go "hey, that's some thought provoking stuff, there is intelligent writing here between the lines" and that kind of thing..
I would say musical artists get a little more leeway in that department, for whatever reason. Its that old saying I guess, you like a band/artist/whatever until they open their mouth. But as far as music goes, I don't process it on a higher level like a lot of people do. So I tend to be less subjective about my likes and dislikes with regards to it. I prefer mostly non-vocal, electronic or chiptune style music, or orchestrated music along the lines of video game soundtracks. I rarely sit and listen music "for the experience" to immerse myself in it, like I would a book or movie. I do have lots of favorites but mostly its background noise. Like I'm just listening to FM Radio while I type this whole post out, etc.... This is not a perfect answer, but its the best I can come up with.
Garbage, to me, is just pandering to the lowest common denominator. Riding trends into the ground and not stopping when they should have been long buried.
There's a whiff in this thread of a starting "old music is good, new music is bad" theme. How do you keep it from turning into nothing more than expressions of personal opinion -- akin to "I like broccoli, therefore broccoli is great!" vs "I hate broccoli, therefore broccoli is evil!" -- without some objective measures?
I'm not going to stray into "X decade was better" territory. I just don't put much stock in commercial sales as an objective quantifier of quality, because I have 0 faith in the public consumer consciousness to provide any sort of useful reflection. The public has proven time and time again they will buy substandard quality of works, no matter what it is. Music, cars, literature, movies, tools, etc. If its cheap, and it lets them keep up with the joneses, be part of the "in" crowd and like what everyone else likes, they'll do it. I used to do this all the time; and then I matured a bit and thought "well this is dumb behavior".
On the other hand, I realize that I don't really like The Beatles but a LOT of people do. I can't name any of their songs, and I only know partial lyrics to some of them. I think they're overrated and boomers fawn over them because that was their thing, that's their nostalgia. It's like me and video game music. I get it. If 99% of the world thinks The Beatles were the greatest band ever, well fine. That's a few billion people versus my opinion.
I don't think its possible to truly objectively quantify something like "great". Emotional experiences are a very personal thing after all. But at the same time, I just look around me and you got mostly, people just doing the same old thing. There is still that distinction of works of arts that truly are great for their societal impact. The Beatles, no matter what I think of them, clearly falls into such a category.
I'm more interested in, "hey, what's different over here". I don't really care about "metal" for instance. But I like BabyMetal. A lot of people like them; a lot of established metal bands have come out in support of them; even though what they do is more of a pop-fusion of different styles of metal with a hint of j-pop. I mean, you go on twitter and you see people like Rob Zombie telling his fans to STFU they don't know what they're talking about re: hating on BabyMetal.. They are a very different, and very energetic entertaining group when they do their live shows. It's just. Different. Maybe decades from now people will be arguing over how great a band they were ??
I don't know. I wasn't really intending to be contentious in my original post, because I don't pretend to have any real interest in debating or winning debates about music.
I do have a habit of thinking out loud though.
or more to the point, I love to give opinions but I am far too lazy to defend my positions