Track 3 is a ballad. Save the ballads for the end of the album please.

Intro tracks: they all sound the same. When I'm checking out an album I always start at track 2, because track 1 is inevitably an intro track.

Crescendos: ditto, all the same. Unless you are Godspeed! You Black Emperor where your whole music is one big crescendo/diminuendo.

Martial drums: so cliched.

When an album has 2/3 good tracks on it, and 10 fillers. This is why people don't like albums anymore: listen to Sgt Pepper: every track should be a hit single goddamnit. Take the time and effort to write a whole album's worth of great material, not just two songs.

When albums "sag" in the middle: when the middle section of an album is a bunch of unmemorable midtempo dirge (and some ballads).

The blues.

The idea that film soundtracks have to be some version of this swelling John Williams pseudo classical symphony music: they don't. In fact films don't have to have music at all (one of the reasons I loved No Country for Old Men).

Pandering: when a band or artist is clearly very obviously trying to target a certain demographic or fanbase. I like music that thinks outside of generic boundaries, or at least does something different with genre conventions.