The geography of music preferences

Abstract

Considerable attention has been paid to America's political and economic divides. These divides revolve around class and location, with more affluent, more educated and denser places leaning more open-minded and liberal and less affluent, less educated and less dense places leaning more conservative. We contend that such divides are also reflected and reinforced by preferences, attitudes and predispositions for culture. More specifically we argue that Americans' preferences for music will reflect dimensions of these political and economic divides. To test this proposition, our research examines the geographic variation of five key categories of music preferences across 95 of the largest US metropolitan areas. We use factor analysis to identify and map geographic variation of musical preferences, and we use both bivariate correlation analyses and regression analysis to examine the associations between metro-level musical preferences and key economic, demographic, political, and psychological variables. We find that musical preferences generally reflect and reinforce America's broader economic and political divides. Data, variables and methodologyOur study examines the geographic divide in music preferences across 95 of the largest US metropolitan regions. We expect that: (1) music preferences will vary substantially across metro regions, and (2) that such variation will reflect and be shaped by regional variation in underlying economic and political divides. To test these claims, we employ data from a large-scale Internet survey involving approximately 120,000 individuals. 92,000 of these live in big metropolitan regions J Cult Econ (2018) 42:593-618 595

Musical preferences of Brazilian high school students

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A hidden message: Decoding artistic intent

“…This notion is consistent with the previously reported correlation between understanding and appreciating an artwork (Silvia, 2005(Silvia, , 2006. Similarly, psychological and sociological investigations have shown that more sophisticated and complex musical genres (e.g., folk, bluegrass, blues, jazz, opera, classic) that require more experienced composers with more musical education are preferred by audiences with higher social or professional positions (Mellander, Florida, Rentfrow, & Potter, 2018;Peterson, 1992), higher education (Mellander et al, 2018), and greater intellectual openness (Rentfrow & Gosling, 2003). An analogous relationship also has been found between age and musical preferences; in particular, older people with more experience have been shown to prefer more complex genres (North & Hargreaves, 1997;Rentfrow & Gosling, 2003).…”

“…We hypothesize that higher levels of education and more varied personal experiences encourage a more diverse conceptual dictionary. Support for this notion comes from the previously cited investigations that have examined the popularity of different genres of music among individuals with different levels of education and of different ages (Mellander et al, 2018;Peterson, 1992).…”

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