One of the things that bugs me about the times we live in is an increasing tendency to tinker pointlessly with the edges whilst not addressing the central problem. You see this in politics on a daily basis – Donald Trump wanted to build a wall to stop Mexicans coming to the USA is just one recent example.

Now, I’m all in favour of treating people the same. This blog doesn’t care whether you’re male, female, somewhere between the two or neither. I also don’t care about your sexuality, the colour of your skin or your religion. I’m interested in whether you’re a good person. Do you treat people fairly? Do you stand up for what’s real?

It’s with this in mind I read the news that the Brit Awards are going gender neutral next year. So no more best male and best female categories. It’ll mean a shorter show, hence why they’ve dug up the long dead Best Dance category – something that’ll have the likes of Defected’s Simon Dunmore frothing at the mouth.

The trouble is that all this messing about with side issues fails to grasp the mantle of the central problem. And what is that central problem? It’s namely that much of what consists of pop music these days is crap. And don’t take my word for it – look at the viewing figures.

Courtesy of Wikipedia, we can see viewing figures going all the way back to 1999 – nearly ten million viewers tuned in to see show that year. Since then, the trend has been overwhelmingly downwards – they couldn’t even pull in three million viewers this year. Episodes of teatime game show The Chase score better.

There’s a reason they’re not watching – and it’s not just the largely appalling music on offer. It’s also the fact the show itself is dreadful. Time was you had to watch because you never knew what was going to happen. Remember John Prescott being soaked by Chumbawumba in 1998, or Brandon Block gatecrashing Ronnie Wood in 2000?

They weren’t the most edifying of events, but at least we remember them. Can you name anything remotely interesting that happened at a Brit Awards ceremony in the past decade? I certainly can’t. The music used to be interesting, and so did the show as a result.

And tinkering with awards categories will not change one single thing. All it will do is make it harder for acts to win awards and inevitably result in uproar if more men are given awards than women. The only people who look set to win no matter what happens are those who are already very rich.

Daniel Ek, Rob Stringer, Stephen Cooper and Baron Grainge of £150million…