Personality is the behavior of music.
The valuable part of personality is style, which gives a human face to music. Every feelgood song has style, style is also the degree of extraversion in music.
The worthless part of personality, and also the trashy part of a song is stylelessness. The reason for a song being partly or totally bad is always its displeasing features of behavior. Stylelessness is embodied usually two ways: it's either that the artist wants to force some kind of feeling or atmosphere in a way it doesn't work, either because the artist lacks of talent or inspiration, or their conception or sentiment about the given feeling or atmosphere is wrong or sick. Or the other case is when the whole personality is so shallow or depraved that nothing good can come out of it. So everything bad one can think of, falls under stylelessness: pretentiousness, overstatement, trying too hard, kitsch, cheesiness, tweeness, stiffness, mannerism, dandiness, shallowness, goofiness, posing, acting tough, hate (when power is substituted with aggression), lethargy (when depth is substituted with energy vampire act).
If a song “doesn't have much style”, and simultaneously has a rich atmospheric or emotional content, it means that it's not the style the song communicates with, or in other words, only a little amount of personality is manifested in the song. Because of this, the song will have less style value obviously, but it doesn't mean at all that the song is styleless, only that it focuses inward. Stylelessness begins always at the negative part of personality.
Character is the flavor of music, the degree of refinedness in music.
Character evokes a feeling in the listener, instead of emotions. Character can only evoke emotions indirectly (depending on the importance of the given feeling to the listener), it doesn't contain targeted emotions. (I only know one exception, when the extremely sophisticated feeling is also an emotion at the same time: Autechre – Iera, but the rareness of this is the main reason why this track is so great.)
Character can have of two distinct components: style and atmosphere. The degree of both components is determined by their refinedness: both the powerfulness of personality, or the ability of atmosphere of making a very specific atmospheric feeling totally tangible and distinct. Style is the extroverted part, and atmosphere is the introverted part of character. (Apparently because character is valuable, the extraversion in it is not at the expense of depth, it doesn't goofify.)
A 5-8 out of 10 song usually reaches refinedness with style, while a 9-10 song usually does this with atmosphere. Atmospheric music is only a small portion of all the world's music, there are relatively few moderately refined tracks. High degree of refinedness however is manifested in atmosphere much more often, than in style; extreme refinedness of the character is rarely because of the complexity of personality.
Atmosphere doesn't contain negative values, there's no negative atmosphere. There's cheesiness, forcing of atmosphere, which is a feature of personality. Unpleasant or depressing atmosphere is valuable, and should not be confused with depressing feelings of atmospheric kind that originate indirectly from bad personality.
Emotion is the part of music that is directed directly at the listener's personal emotions or mood.
Emotion is completely separable from character, but has a loose connection to it. Emotion uses character as its own emotional frame. With the use of style, it can communicate through personality, like in case of party music or tracks with deep psychic pain. It can also use atmosphere as an atmospheric frame for emotions, this is typical for songs with heavenly atmosphere. Emotion can also use both character components, like in case of music with festival atmosphere, or really ballsy but introverted tracks.
There is no refinedness in case of emotion. The distinctiveness of an emotion derives from its complexity, that is, how much of a person's experience is needed to be able to feel that emotion. Complexity doesn't make emotion more valueble, more “characteristic”.
Emotion is not determined by subjective, person-by-person factors, neither by how many people get touched by the music. The level of emotional reactions of the person who gets most affected by the emotional value, is the objective value. At the same time, only tasteful, stylish emotions count as emotional value. That part of emotional reactions, for which the listener's insensivity on tastless_ness is needed, doesn't count.
Emotion is not affected by a lack of context, i.e. it has to be considered with the right context. Emotion is not affected by any factors unrelated to the music, it has to be rated with all necessary circumstances given. In this sense, complexity doesn't make emotion less valuable either.
Emotion doesn't have a negative range. Just like in case of atmosphere, there is no bad emotion that would worsen the music. Negative emotions are valuable. And if a song is full of someone's tasteless emotions then that song is not emotive, but has a sentimentalizing personality, which counts as stylelessness.
In the aspect of value, the importance of the original context of the music is determined by the degree of the original contextual role of the music. Context can benefit any of the positive components.
2013, László Bene