The issue one might have, casually scrolling through the nominations for this year’s BRIT Awards, is simple enough: what amounts to merit in commercial art, and what does merit amount to?

The answer would appear equally as simple, and the implication as casually debasing: merit is money, and money is merit. Sure, many of you can at this point imagine a romantic night in a candlelit restaurant, aimlessly babbling as the Merlot disappears, I stammer to my date: “that’s just the wine talking”. Replace the word “wine” with “doe-eyed leftist student fantasy” and you wouldn’t be far off.

The disclaimers don’t end there. “Dean of American Rock Critics” Robert Christgau notes that the mark of a good reviewer is 1. to know what you like, and 2. to be able to express what you like as simply as possible. There is something to be said for a metalhead to know a good R&B album when they hear one: the consensus of critics could do a whole lot worse than the international nominations, with Kendrick Lamar, Courtney Barnett and Tame Impala gracing the running order. And, of course, it is pleasing to see such British names as Blur and Aphex Twin on the cards; their respective efforts were both at once coolly delivered, daring and sensitive. If, however, your tastes broaden beyond the Christgau-approved triad of Dylan, the Stones, the Beatles, does Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s saying “if you open your mind too much your brain will fall out” ring true?

However, I see more serious issues at hand than can be explained away by the contingency of taste. There is so much damn money thrown around at these awards. They’re even sponsored by money itself, MasterCard once more endorsing music as a “powerful force for good” with all the recalcitrant irony of the McChurch of Twilight England lauding the cows for their worthy sacrifice. The cycle of “musical excellence” grows more and more impenetrable and unfathomable each year.

Yes, it becomes ever more apparent that awards like these are a pat on the back from the BPI to the BPI. Another year, another hundred-thousand-sales quota met, another shrine built around which to chew the fat of over-reaped yield. Money moves in funny circles, a fact to which both the meteoric rise of Adele’s 25 and the worrying number of double, treble and quadruple nominations will lay claim. As if by design, one is compelled, willingly or otherwise, to adhere to these circles until the chickens grow old and the eggs turn sour: do record sales equate to good artistry or good entrepreneurship?

When all’s said and masticated over, the motives of industry award ceremonies are little worth picking apart. It is economic fact that there exists a correlation between investment and reward. It’s probably in the Bible somewhere. The promo campaign doesn’t simply end: it goes on past the billboards and airwaves to the Red Carpet™, even then rippling outwards into the Google and YouTube pecking orders. This tradition of more-equals-best dates back to the earliest days of Melody Maker and the NME, when PR agents would buy out entire stores’ worth of a single to boost its reputation: if it’s doing good, it probably is good. As Saint Etienne keyboardist Bob Stanley put it in his historical survey of modern pop music Yeah Yeah Yeah, would we have remembered those white-hot stars of the fifties, such as Tony Brent and Billie Anthony (us neither) otherwise? Almost certainly not.

Of course, fame is the simple product of the amount of things that there are, as Syndrome’s bitingly accurate aphorism to Mr. Incredible testifies: “if everyone’s super, no-one will be.” It is expected that sheer neutrality will win favour with the many – a recent Guardian article on the dwindling relevance of Coldplay in an age where too much is going right than even Chris Martin can wax banal about, offers good insight. But so much of the music industry is founded on these easy outs – the Adeles, the James Bays and, last year at least, the George Ezras of this world – that so little remains for those less represented by industry; again, owing to the amount of things that there are. Surely it has nothing to do with the fact that what the underground make is as bad and wallpaper-like as what we see nominated this year. If it does, it speaks worrying volumes about what young bands are expected to make and achieve: unattainably polished sounds and songwriting, aimed toward unattainable heights.

As it is, this issue of representation extends to those airwaves themselves. I am a huge admirer of the American college radio movement of the nineties, as it gave voice to such bands as Nirvana and the Smashing Pumpkins. Of course, had the aforementioned been *NSYNC and the Baha Men I might be telling a different story, one where all featured college radio artists pandered so readily to the popular and the worrying volumes above had been writ and re-writ tenfold – the Christgauian dialectic of taste strikes back. Nevertheless, so many “alternative” groups made a name for themselves on the college airwaves, from Sonic Youth through R.E.M., on their own terms, free of any excrement-caked hands of quashing subsidy, pandering to nobody except the “maybe, like, three guys in a dorm somewhere” college radio legend Howard Stern confessed to initially DJing for in his first days at WTBU in Boston University.

If all this sounds like the ramblings of the twenty thousandth foetus to have scrawled “my generation’s music SUX!” under the YouTube video for Love Will Tear Us Apart, maybe you wouldn’t be far wrong. Thankfully, though, not every generation is remembered for its Meghan Trainors alone: I bet you’ve forgotten the names of those fifties stars already. Record sales do not longevity make.

And with that, I’m bracing myself for the agony of Amy Winehouse winning Best Female Artist and her label reaping the reward.