ELI5: Why are some people born with a good singing voice and others aren't?

[Edit: I forgot to stress, with music it's all subjective, some of the guys and girls I used as examples, you might hate their voice. My TL;DR is basically - replying to the above comment - in my eyes there should be tonnes of people in the extremely rare category, and it's not so much 'special biological features', but more that everyone has a different voice, and some just sound really fucking nice.]

I like this, but I would argue that the majority of famous singers not having exceptionally good voices is more of a comment on pop music than anything else. I don't buy the ''extremely rare'. Some people just naturally have great voices, and even with minimal training/training themselves they would still sound great to me, as I personally just like their voice. Or maybe a better point is that say, A) Person with a naturally beautiful voice who is well trained and B) Person with an average voice who is really well trained, I would choose to listen to A.

(This is just me personally) Otis Redding, Elvis, Ray Charles, Aretha, James Brown, Marvin Gaye, Sam Cooke, Al Green, David Bowie, Freddie Mercury, Sixto Rodriguez, Damon Albarn John Lennon and many, many others sound infinitely better to me than the most well trained singers. Maybe if I saw them live I would be very impressed by the well trained singer, but I wouldn't feel it like I would with those guys.

A good example I can think of is a young Liam Gallagher, in 1993-4 when it was fresh (aka not fucked from a terrible lifestyle and being a screaming singer) his voice was out of this world man. He had no pro training, just playing in his small band which then 'became' Oasis. He was probably no where near as well trained as say Katy Perry, Kesha or whoever, but if we're saying who's got the nicer voice (in my opinion) then to me it's not even close.

/r/explainlikeimfive Thread