My Musical Pet Hates.

1. Songs that don't know when to end.

  If you're going to have a seven minute song there had better be something interesting going on in those last three minutes - have the guitarists duel with each other, suddenly change gear and crank up the volume, let the keyboard player have a solo, anything but repeat the chorus again and again and again and again...
Example: Anything off Judas Priest's Jugulator album. No kidding. There is not a single song on that album that couldn't lose a minute and a half and be all the better for it.

2. Mariah Carey Syndrome

   And this seems to be exclusive to female singers. specifically female singers who have a good range and want everybody to know it. Every single word is stretched out, bounced around the scale  and occasionally turned into something only dogs can hear. Why? It serves no useful purpose and gets on my tits something fierce.

3. Sudden outbreaks of rapping. 

   I'm not a massive fan of rap but I can appreciate the odd song here and there. What I do fail to understand is the ongoing tendency to shoehorn rap segments into songs that are otherwise mainstream.
 Fun fact. There has never yet been a pop song that has been improved by having Snoop Dogg pop up in the middle.
 Even Rush did this on the Roll The Bones album. Oh dear.
 (No, it wasn't Snoop Dogg. That would have been too weird for words.)

4. Miserable women with pianos. 

  I'm not a big fan of singer-songwriters. I prefer my music amplified and upbeat so having somebody wander onstage clutching an acoustic guitar will usually send me off to the bar.
  But there's one subspecies that causes me actual pain plus a fervent desire to stick a pencil in somebody's eye and that would be Miserable Women With Pianos. Adele, for instance.
 Fans would probably describe their product as "Personal", "Intimate" and  "Emotional" whereas I'd describe it as "Boring", "Shite" and "Why am I listening to somebody whining about how much their life sucks?"
 Screw that.

5. The Musical Makeover

 There's nothing wrong with tweaking your sound to keep current. Rush, Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, Yes and Pink Floyd (among others) have all taken a look at the musical climate around them,thought "We can do that" and adapted to fit. Usually there's a clear progression from album to album where you can track this happening.
 Then there's the bands that suddenly switch sounds completely.  Let me give you an example.
Ultravox made their name as a synthpop outfit, albeit one with grandiose leanings and a surprisingly useful guitarist.

But then they went  from this:

To this:

 Note the new clothes, brass section, backing singers and 

blatant ditching of all the elements I'd liked them for.

 If you want more examples, pick a Hair Metal band from the early 90s. An awful lot of them tried to jump on the Grunge bandwagon and got run over. Or any fading star that suddenly discovers dance music. (Looking at you, Cher. And you Wishbone Ash.)
 It gets particularly annoying when said artist announces that they are now making the sort of music they wanted to make all along.
 It's always nice when somebody basically let's all their fans know that he thinks they are mugs. Cheers.