As a practicing musician of 2 decades I of course have opinions on what good music is and what isn't on multiple layers. So I will critique music (the thing) but not musicians (the people). Receiving good criticism by other musicians is really good way to get better, as they will notice things you wont — provided they are open for the type of music you're making.

However I noticed a peculiar thing. In every field you will find people who are really enthusiastic for the field without doing it themselves. Maybe we could call them "enthusiastic consumers". These are very often the people giving the harshest, most unfair, least constructive critiques for some reason and the closer your thing is to the thing they love the harsher they can become. To them consuming that thing is their identity, so which thing they consume is existentially important to then. To me music is much more about the making, and while listening about countless things. Musicians tend to be more open about what constitutes good mhsic than these enthusiasts.

As a former art student one important leason I have learned in countless group reviews is that criticism based purely on taste are utterly worthless. If a classical music nerd dislikes your noiserock piece purely because of taste that just tells you something about them. This is what the criticism of most entusiastic consumers looks like. Another thing I have learned is that people are usually correct something feels wrong to them if they are really going into the thing with open eyes and an open heart. But people totally suck at telling you how to fix it.

So my advice on how to deal with criticsm is:

1. Figure out the nature of the criticism and judge accordingly. Is it purely a matter of taste? Is the root cause of observation valid?

2. Most criticism can help you getting better or worse, which one depends a lot on how you deal with it. You can reframe criticism to not be about you, but about the thing you do (and try to do well!). In that case every valid point someone makes will now no longer be an attack on your person, but a chance to make your work even better

3. Do things for their own sake and you're somewhat immune to criticism. If you enjoy playing guitar, it should not matter to you that you suck while doing it. Everybody good sucked for a long time before they were good and many of the most innovative new developements were made by people who did not care they were "doing it wrong"

4. There is no single correct way to do a thing and thus there are always people who will hate your stuff for a various number of reasons. This means nothing unless they got a valid point be it in terms of craft or emotion.

5. In German there is the notion of "Wer macht hat recht", which very loosely translates to "those who do are in the right". Action beats opinion. Talking is cheap.

Thanks for posting this. I learn some about the topic as I am not very good receiving criticism.