Research reveals why our musical tastes can’t be grouped into overarching genres

Preference for certain things and styles is an important aspect of people’s identities and social lives. Preferences can influence the way people act and make decisions. How to most accurately describe musical tastes is difficult and debatable due to the ever-changing diversity and transformation of music.

Using a subgenre-aware approach, German researchers surveyed the music tastes of more than 2,000 people and identified five genres: European classical music, electronic dance music (EDM), metal, pop and music. I’ve done a lot of research on fans. stone.

“Our analysis suggests that even people who like the same genre are more likely to be in any When asked if they liked genres, it became clear that tastes can vary widely.” Frontiers of psychology. “Thus, fans of a particular genre should not be perceived as a homogenous group with the same tastes. We need to recognize the difference between

subgroups with different tastes

“People often use genre terms when they talk about their musical tastes. But on a genre level, while Beatles and Rolling Stones fans are all rock fans, they themselves probably perceive a big difference. I think so,” continued Mr. Ciebrasse.

To express these differences empirically, her co-author Melanie Waldo-Furman designed a questionnaire in which participants indicated how much they liked the sub-styles associated with the investigated genre. By systematically recording preferences at the genre and subgenre level, researchers were able to obtain a more differentiated picture of musical preferences.

As researchers examined attitudes toward subgenres, several classes of preference emerged. Three of these classes liked all subgenres about equally, the authors wrote, very, moderately, or even poorly. However, the two taste classes differed in that they each preferred sub-styles that were either more challenging or easier to work with. Across all genres, subtypes representing mainstream variants were generally preferred over more challenging alternatives.

The researchers also found that sociodemographic and personality variables such as age, environment-related attitudes, and openness can predict belonging to genre groups or preference classes within genres. For pop music, for example, researchers found a clear age effect. It showed that the pop music people liked correlated with the age of the subgroup. The pop music that people liked the most was that of his decade when they were around his 20s.

in a wider perspective

What Siebrasse and Wald Fermann achieved was a more accurate representation of the actual musical tastes of German residents than previous studies. Some of the results, such as identifying preference classes within genres, may be applicable across countries and cultures. However, other results, including genre-specific findings, may depend on the history and role of genres in their respective musical worlds.

“We have taken an important step towards enabling further development of questionnaires to explore musical tastes,” said Ciebrasse. “In the future, we should extend our approach to other genres and regions. A further step might be to combine this kind of research with specific sound examples.”