香京julia种子在线播放

On a conceptual level, musical taste is primarily understood as the types of music that people like and dislike, i.e., content. Categorizations of musical content mainly draw on categories that are invented and used by the music industry, musicians, critics and fans; they are used to sort music into what are commonly referred to as genres or styles, with super- and sub-genres and -styles also being acknowledged (Lena, 2012; Brackett, 2016).

There are several general approaches for quantitatively measuring actual musical tastes, but also taste-related preference behavior (Greasley and Lamont, 2016). Most often, researchers use questionnaires with lists of music category terms. The Musical Preference Scale (Litle and Zuckerman, 1986) or the Short Test of Musical Preferences (STOMP) and its revised version (STOMP-R) (Rentfrow and Gosling, 2003; Rentfrow et al., 2011) represent attempts to create standardized item batteries. Some studies have also used music clips meant to represent genres in addition to or instead of genre names, such as the Music Genres-Clips-Test (Bonneville-Roussy et al., 2017) or the excerpts used to establish the MUSIC model (Rentfrow et al., 2011, 2012). Only very few studies conceptualize musical taste on some other basis than that of genre, such as artist names (the Artist-based Musical Preferences measure; Ferrer et al., 2012) or genre-independent properties like melodic, rhythmic, harmonic and timbral characteristics or emotional expression (Schwartz and Fouts, 2003).

The advantages and disadvantages of each of these approaches have been discussed in the literature. In particular, genre-based measurement tools have been criticized because of the elusive and dynamic nature of genre terms, numbers, characteristics, and cultural associations, as well as the difficulties in distinguishing genres from super- and sub-genres (Greasley and Lamont, 2016; Brisson and Bianchi, 2020; Eggert, 2022). Although genre-based, the STOMP(−R) (Rentfrow and Gosling, 2003; Rentfrow et al., 2011) was meant to provide a general measurement tool and to overcome style- and genre-based descriptions of musical tastes by identifying higher-order factors with the help of dimension-reduction techniques. Its choice of musical categories, however, has been criticized from a musicological perspective inasmuch as they mix genres, sub-genres, styles, forms, and function-oriented categories (e.g., classical music and opera, with the latter being a form within the genre of classical music; religious music and soundtrack being defined not stylistically, but because of their function) and are biased towards Anglo-American music (Fleischer, 2012; see also Bonneville-Roussy et al., 2013; Brisson and Bianchi, 2020; Eggert, 2022). Accordingly, studies using the STOMP(−R) for non-Anglo-American samples omitted, added, or modified items to make it fit (Fricke and Herzberg, 2017; Warrener et al., 2020). Such modifications often led to factor solutions that differed in number and structure from the original factor structure, thus calling its validity into question (Chung et al., 2019; Brisson and Bianchi, 2020). However, even if no modifications are made and the original items of the STOMP are used, the original factor structure can possibly not be replicated, as in the study of Dunn et al. (2012). Lastly, broad genres—but even more so, the factors comprising several of them—reduce existing musical diversity to such an extent that it may no longer be possible to capture people’s actual tastes in a meaningful way (Greasley and Lamont, 2016).

Qualitative studies that allow people to characterize their musical taste in terms of how they themselves understand it show that people indeed refer to genres; but they also tend to go into more detail. They single out particularly appealing components of their generally liked genre(s) by naming musicians, composers, or performers, and by referring to musical elements, but also to sub-genre categories (Kunz, 1998; Greasley et al., 2013; Berli, 2014; Greb et al., 2017; Ackermann, 2019). The history of music is also full of cases of people drawing a very sharp line between types of music that might seem rather similar to outsiders: there is the notorious 19th-century “War of the Romantics” between classicist “Brahmins” and progressive Wagnerians (Walker, 1993, pp. 338–367); and there are opera fans who would never attend a string quartet concert and vice versa—nevertheless, all of these types of music fall into the category of classical music. Similarly, there are mutually exclusive fan groups for The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, both of which count as Rock‘n’Roll; and there are delineations in the world of metal that are hard to grasp by non-metalheads, but are matters of life and death for participants in their associated scenes (Walser, 1993; Chaker, 2014; Smialek, 2016).

Given the musical and societal, but also economic relevance of such within-genre demarcations, it seems worthwhile to consider them as well in empirical taste research (Vlegels and Lievens, 2017). Sub-genres and -styles can provide one possible starting point for this: they inhabit a middle ground between the too-granular level of individual artists or works and a genre as a whole. In addition, they reflect how insiders construct differences within a genre and come with related associations and meanings.

Sub-genres and -styles are features of many genres, first and foremost those with a longer history and with a particularly large number of exemplars. Sub-genres can evolve in succession or simultaneously. They can differ from each other in terms of one or more musical features, the instruments used, and the forms they take (such as masses and motets in Renaissance music vs. symphonies, solo concertos, and operas in the Romantic period of European classical music), as well as the style, content, and topics of any lyrics and libretti they may have, or performance aspects, such as playing and singing techniques. But they may also differ with regard to their underlying aesthetics and value systems and the social groups they appeal to. One could even say that sub-genres—just like genres—often create their own social milieu (Born, 2011).

Despite the large amount of historical and anecdotal evidence for the potential relevance of sub-genres for people’s musical taste, they are mostly absent in empirical taste research. So far, only very few studies include some sub-genres and -styles in their item lists, but in an unsystematic way and without explicitly acknowledging their nature as sub-genres (Otte, 2008; Rentfrow et al., 2011). To redress this omission, the present study explores whether people who like one of five large Western music genres (European classical music, electronic dance music, metal, pop, and rock) can be further distinguished into sub-groups on the basis of their attitudes towards sub-genres of the respective genres. The sub-groups were identified using Latent Profile Analysis (LPA), a person-centered approach to uncovering latent groups that show a similar rating behavior on a number of ordinal or continuous variables.

Tastes, like music genres and sub-genres as well, have an inherently social component (Schulze, 1992–2000; Brackett, 2016). At the same time, people see their own and others’ tastes as expressions of personality and individuality, thus constituting taste publics (Fox and Wince, 1975; Hargreaves, 1986, p. 179ss.; Shepherd, 2003). Accordingly, there are sociological and psychological research strands that attempt to correlate tastes with sociodemographic and personality variables. We therefore analyzed whether the taste differences of sub-groups were also related to sociodemographic and psychological differences, including Sinus-Milieus, a lifestyle measure that had never before been used in research on musical taste (SINUS Markt- und Sozialforschung GmbH, 2018). The data for this study came from a representative survey on musical taste in Germany with N = 2,086 participants.

This study contains data from a subsample of n = 1,749 participants (49.0% female, 51.0% male, M_age = 48.0 years, SD_age = 17.4, age range: 18–94) of a total of N = 2,086 participants, who were surveyed on various aspects of their musical taste via a mixed-methods procedure using online or computer-assisted personal interviews (CAPI). This approach was chosen to survey a sample that was representative in terms of age, gender, education, and state of residence for the German population aged 18 and above. We commissioned the Ipsos Institute to collect the data from their own panel. Data collection took place from December 2016 to February 2017. Participants in the online study (n = 1,204) were invited via e-mail after being selected by the sampling tool Samplix, which randomly draws a sample from a panel of 160,000 people using the above quotas mentioned above. For CAPI (n = 882), trained and supervised interviewers interviewed the target persons via telephone. The average duration of the survey was 20.0 min (online) and 38.5 min (CAPI). Participants received no fee or recompensation.

Mean liking ratings for sub-genres range between 3.00 and 3.74 (classical), 3.00 and 3.70 (EDM), 2.79 and 3.81 (metal), 3.20 and 4.08 (pop), and 2.66 and 3.84 (rock) (see Figure 1). Similar patterns emerged across genres: sub-genres and -styles that form something like the core, standard, or prototype of the respective genre are most liked, such as baroque, classical, and romantic orchestra music, classic metal, pop from the 80s to the current charts, Rock and roll and classic rock. Also, more “digestible,” easier-to-process sub-genres, such as musicals, trance, deep house, symphonic metal, soft rock, or Neue deutsche Welle, are generally preferred over more challenging variants.

In the following, we report results of associations between taste groups and sociodemographic and personality variables, first on the level of genre groups, and then across sub-genre taste classes on the basis of logistic regression models. Descriptive statistics can be found in Table 2 (genre level) and Table 3 (class level); regression models can be found in Table 4 (genre level) and Table 5 (class level).

Sociodemographic variables were: age, gender, education level (low, medium, and high), socioeconomic status (low, middle, and high), and milieu-related attitude (tradition, modernization, and reorientation). The two latter variables were derived from the Sinus Milieu classification of each participant. As a measure of personality, we used the BIG-5 personality traits.

Across genres, both the sub-styles that represent the standard or core of the genre and those that can be seen as perceptually and cognitively less challenging were most liked. This overall liking pattern reflects two fundamental theories in empirical aesthetics, namely the preference for prototypicality (Martindale and Moore, 1988; North and Hargreaves, 2008, p. 84ss.) and the role of processing fluency for liking (Reber et al., 2004). These theories can also help to explain the emergence of classes that liked only the mainstream (i.e., prototypical), softer, and easier-to-process (i.e., more fluent) variants of a genre, particularly in classical music, EDM, metal, and rock. The relevant preference patterns, however, were associated with sociodemographic and personality traits, most importantly higher age, lower education, lower openness scores, and a tendency towards traditionalism. Therefore, the preference for prototypical and easy-to-process types of music is not solely a direct consequence of perceptual properties, but is also influenced by individual traits.

Those classes, however, that preferred perceptually and cognitively more challenging sub-styles and disliked the more mainstream ones seem to contradict theories of prototypicality and processing fluency. Here, arousal-based explanations (Berlyne, 1974; North and Hargreaves, 2008, p. 76ss.) or findings on the relationship between personality traits and preferences might be relevant (Rentfrow and McDonald, 2010). In our dataset, some evidence pointed towards underlying personality differences: in both classical music and rock, the sophisticated/hard classes had particularly high openness scores combined with the lowest extraversion scores of their group. Another potentially relevant trait that was not measured in our study but is known to be correlated with openness may be the need for cognition, which has already been discussed in the context of liking metal (Butkovic and Dopudj, 2017; Schmaltz et al., 2020). The finding of two contrasting types of musical tastes – one with a clear preference for easier forms of music, the other with a preference for more challenging ones – also reminds of the pleasure-interest model of aesthetic liking by Graf and Landwehr (2015, 2017). This model claims that pleasure and interest should be seen as two processes that can lead to aesthetic liking and are dependent on stimuli affordances and personality. Whereas Graf & Landwehr derived their theory from ratings of concrete stimuli, our results could be interpreted as showing the relevance of these two dimensions also on the meta-level of long-term attitudes towards music measured via (sub-)genre terms.

However, classes that disliked prototypical and easier sub-styles, but liked harder and more sophisticated variants were found for only some of the styles and consistently formed the smallest sub-group; this taste profile thus appears to be a relatively rare case. It nevertheless reflects discourses within some taste communities, e.g., that of EDM, where real fans or afficionados are expected to distinguish themselves by preferring challenging, avantgarde, and hip variants over mainstream types, and underground forms are developed to counter the popular variants (Jóri, 2021).

For pop music, a somewhat different picture emerged. This was in part related to the presented sub-styles having a different structure, and in part to the category of pop music in general, which can be defined by stylistic features much less clearly (Frith, 2001; Warwick, 2013). Our sub-genre categorization depended mainly on decades, which is a very common feature in pop music practices and discourses (e.g., there are many radio stations dedicated to pop music from only one or two decades). However, this approach did not allow for patterns of liking or disliking prototypicality to emerge. Rather, it afforded a response pattern that was more in line with theories about cohort effects of music preferences, most importantly the theory of song-specific age in popular music (Holbrook and Schindler, 1989; Kopiez et al., 2021) and of a reminiscence bump effect (Janssen et al., 2007).

That musical tastes might be grouped into types such as sophisticated/complex, mainstream/conventional, or hard/intense has already been proposed in other studies. One research strand is connected to the German sociologist Gerhard Schulze, who described three types of everyday aesthetics: the high culture scheme, the trivial scheme, and the tension scheme (Schulze, 1992–2000). Another direction is connected to music-psychological research on genre-independent structures of musical tastes (see, e.g., Rentfrow and Gosling, 2003; George et al., 2007). However, while these researchers’ interpretation was mostly based on genres or factors that comprised a number of musical (sub-)genres (see the MUSIC model of music taste proposed by Rentfrow et al., 2011; but see also Brisson and Bianchi, 2020, who demonstrate that already slight changes in the underlying data result in genres being grouped into different factors, thus challenging their interpretation), we show that similar types of taste exist already within one genre community (but see also Rentfrow et al., 2012, who found factors similar to the MUSIC model within jazz and rock). This suggests that genres (let alone groups of genres) are not the best level at which to account for structural differences between tastes because, amongst others, most genres cover a broad range of stylistic, formal, and expressive features that vary in how demanding and complex they are and have meaningful sub-branches that not all fans like equally well. Instead, one should consider those genre components that people actually like (or dislike) in order to describe and explain taste in a more nuanced way.

In light of the existing literature on musical taste, two of our results are particularly noteworthy. These are, first, the unexpected existence of a class that dislikes (almost) all sub-styles of a genre they reported to like. The existence of such, albeit small, low preference classes is in our view yet another indicator of the relatively poor meaning of a solely genre-related measurement of musical tastes. Also, the fact that the low preference classes are also characterized by lower openness scores indicates that it is not just a lower interest in that particular style, but in aesthetic artefacts in general (McCrae, 1993).

Another contribution of this study is its comparison of group differences in terms of sociodemographic composition and personality traits between and within genres and the finding that differences within genres were often larger than those between them. To date, research on musical taste and associated sociodemographic and personality differences has mostly focused on differences on the genre and genre-factor level, assuming that taste differences can be at least partly explained by these other differences.

The fact that in our study, differences between genre groups were often smaller than earlier studies lead one to expect is partly a consequence of allowing people to report their liking for more than one genre (as opposed to, e.g., North and Hargreaves, 2007a,b,c). This way, they fall into more than one genre group which leads to a relative similar composition of these groups.

Only when we compared people who liked a genre and those who disliked it did clearer differences appear. However, sociodemographic and personality traits predicted only preferences for classical music, EDM, and metal, and almost not at all pop and rock preferences. Dunn et al. (2012) also report small and inconsistent correlations between musical tastes, preferences, and the Big Five personality dimensions and conclude that both personality traits and musical tastes need to be captured more accurately.

Within genres, however, while pop and rock taste classes showed large differences from each other, the EDM and metal classes were very similar with regard to their sociodemographic composition and personality traits. We interpret this as reflecting a meaningful distinction between niche and mainstream preferences: while pop and rock listeners—being the largest groups—were quite representative of the general population, people who liked less popular genres were more distinct from it. Further, while fans of age-related niche genres in popular music (EDM, metal) were different from the general population, they were homogenous amongst themselves, whereas fans of mainstream genres in popular music (pop and rock) differed amongst themselves. Classical music, not being a popular music genre, is different in this regard, thus there are relatively large differences on both levels.

Sociodemographic or personality traits that predict belonging to a genre group or within-genre taste class were most often: age, milieu-related attitude, and openness; in some cases also: gender, education, extraversion, and agreeableness; and rarely to never: socioeconomic status, neuroticism, and conscientiousness. Except for the two Sinus-Milieu dimensions, which have never before been used in studies on musical tastes, the other factors are known to be of relevance and to distinguish between tastes on the levels of genre and genre factor (North and Hargreaves, 2008; Rentfrow and McDonald, 2010; Fricke and Herzberg, 2017). We extend these findings to differences within genre groups. While age, education, milieu-related attitude, and openness are similarly important on the genre and class levels, gender and agreeableness were only found to predict liking a genre, but not belonging to a within-genre taste class.

Two of these predictors may be discussed somewhat more exhaustively here, i.e., age and Sinus-Milieus. Age has been found to be a particularly important factor in previous research. Studies that used the MUSIC model of musical preferences have argued that different age groups prefer different types of music, and claimed an increase in liking so-called unpretentious and sophisticated music with age, but a decrease in liking so-called intense and contemporary music (see, e.g., Bonneville-Roussy et al., 2013), and have interpreted this as an effect of age, not of cohort. In our study, we found a comparable age-relation on the class level for those genres that had a large age range (classical, rock). In both cases, the oldest class preferred the soft/mainstream variants of the given genre, while the youngest group liked the hard/sophisticated sub-genres the most. Also, pop classes showed clear cohort effects. All classes most preferred pop music from the decade when they were around 20 years old. Taken together, this points to a combination of an age effect and a cohort effect in musical taste. The overall liking for a genre is to a large degree determined by musical socialization in adolescence and can be expected to remain relatively stable across the lifespan; whereas with age, preference within a given genre can change to adapt to individual changes in music-related needs and functions. Age dependencies of functions of music listening have already been shown (Schäfer and Sedlmeier, 2009; Hird and North, 2020).

In contrast to age, lifestyles have only rarely been associated with musical taste. For the German context, a classic study is Schulze’s Erlebnisgesellschaft (Schulze, 1992–2000), which described five milieus that differed in terms of their age, education, and which of three schemes of everyday aesthetics they preferred. The relationship between these milieus, schemes, and musical tastes has been examined further, on the basis of a representative German sample from 1997, by Otte (2008), who found differentiated evidence for the existence of the three schemes depending on age cohort, gender, and education level. The music-related item list that was used for their data collection also allowed some within-genre differentiation; e.g., for classical music, distinctions were made between pieces composed before and after 1900, opera, operetta, and musicals. Another large-scale attempt at associating lifestyles with musical tastes was a series of studies by North and Hargreaves (2007a,b,c) with a UK sample. Here, rather than sociologically defined milieus, individual lifestyle facets such as relationships, living arrangements, political beliefs, leisure and travel habits, and health were associated with being a fan of a certain music genre. Results were mapped onto sociological dimensions such as class schemata (upper-, middle-, lower-class; North and Hargreaves, 2007a or liberal—conservative; North and Hargreaves, 2007c). The use of Sinus-Milieus allows the analysis to go beyond these earlier results because they represent sociologically well-defined and -described lifestyle milieus that differ in their socioeconomic status and attitudes. We found that most taste groups and classes were distributed across all ten Sinus-Milieus, although in different ways, and that the attitude dimension, to a far higher degree than socioeconomic status, was the actual factor driving taste differences.

Overall, our findings provoke a theoretical question: What mechanism drives the relationships between musical taste and person-related factors? The most relevant predictors in our study were not fully independent from each other. Most importantly, age was negatively correlated with education and milieu-related attitude, which, in turn, were positively correlated with openness. In cases like the age-homogenous groups of EDM and metal listeners, however, attitude and, marginally, openness were still relevant for telling classes apart. This speaks to an underlying main factor of openness that could be inherited and/or acquired either by education or during the lifespan and that partly influences which genre(s) a person likes, but even more so what parts of it a person likes and how strongly. This contradicts somewhat other studies (e.g., Bonneville-Roussy et al., 2017) in which age differences are interpreted as direct age trends.

Age effects in the sense of cohort or generation effects (Smith, 1994; Glevarec et al., 2020) seem nevertheless to be meaningful in themselves, given that music, like all other cultural practices, is constantly changing and is an inherently historical phenomenon. Gender, socioeconomic status, and other personality traits, however, exert a much smaller influence and on only very few specific tastes.

In light of the apparent importance of attitudes and personality traits, one limitation of this study is that it used a short, ten-item inventory to measure the Big Five personality traits (Rammstedt and John, 2007). This was necessary in the context of the already long questionnaire we were using. Although this and other very short versions of personality inventories have been shown to be reliable and have also been used in other studies on musical tastes (e.g., Rentfrow and Gosling, 2003; Greb et al., 2018), the long versions of the most important traits of openness, conscientiousness, and extraversion could potentially provide an even better idea of their relationship with certain musical tastes, as Dunn et al. (2012) have pointed out. In particular, only two of the six openness facets are covered by the BFI-10, including openness to aesthetics/artistic interest. Future studies are needed to examine whether similarly strong associations exist for other openness facets or for the overall openness measure.

Further, although our sample was representative, it consisted only of people living in Germany. Still, we expect our findings to hold also for other countries where the studied genres are widespread and form a similar constellation. We should be cautious, however, in assuming generalizability to countries with very different musical cultures without further corroborating empirical evidence. In particular, we expect the genre-specific findings to be dependent on the history and role of a genre within its respective musical genre world. The more abstract findings, however, such as the identification of within-genre taste classes, which differ with regard to the degree of liking sub-styles and the liking or disliking of mainstream/soft and sophisticated/hard variants, may be more likely to generalize across music cultures; and the same may be said for the dependency of the degree of differences in sociodemographic composition and personality traits from the popularity of a genre.

Overall, we think that our findings make a strong case for measuring (not only) musical tastes in a more nuanced way, accounting inter alia for sub-styles or other finer-grained differences within overall categories (a related example from the field of movie preference is Nave et al., 2020). While general categories such as genres are helpful for discussing music and taste in everyday life, they do not necessarily capture the musical and sociocultural differences of music very well (Eggert, 2022). Here, one should also consider those differentiations that are discussed by practitioners of the relevant types of music as well as of music theorists and musicologists. Eventually, better inventories for musical tastes are needed. This would allow us to better describe and, finally, to understand (music) taste as a cultural and socio-psychological phenomenon.