What Your Music Says About You

You may want to think twice before you let that acquaintance peruse the contents of your iPod. It turns out a person may be able to discern quite a bit about your personality based on what kind of music you listen to. A recent study by Rentfrow and Gosling indicate that many judgments about the type of people that listen to certain types of music are accurate.

People believe that listeners preferring Bach and Chopin are similar to those who listen to DC Talk and Michael W. Smith-that is, they are easy-going, diligent, and relatively stable. The reported music stereotypes indicate that religious music fans differ from the classical music ones by being more close-minded and friendlier.

A Van Halen fan was seen to be more likely to worry than someone rhyming with Tupac but would be more likely to take up a new hobby. A rocker was seen to abstain from martinis and merlot but would most likely enjoy a Budweiser.

People who listen to contemporary religious music were deemed the most conservative and, not surprisingly, religious. Classical listeners were suspected of being the most brainy and artistic. Someone who likes T-Pain was guessed to be the best at sports and most likely to win a beauty pageant.

But are any of these stereotypes even accurate? It turns out the answer depends on what music genre is being stereotyped. The most accurate music stereotypes (in decreasing order of accuracy) are those concerning contemporary religious, country, classical, jazz, rock, folk, and blues. Ones that aren't accurate enough to even warrant consideration are (in decreasing order of accuracy) heavy metal, electronica, sound tracks, alternative, pop, rap, and soul.

If music sales over the past ten years can be used as an accurate basis for music preferences, you would expect the stereotypes about the most popular music to be the most accurate. The assumption here is that you know more people from which to make your stereotype simply because the most popular music has the greatest fan base. This is partly true as rock, country, religious, and classical are among the list of the seven most popular music genres.

Thus, you may be able to learn something about someone if you hear them listening to Alan Jackson and Keith Urban but don't heed any hunches if you hear them singing along with the Grease soundtrack.

Sources:

Gosling, Sam, "Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You," 155-163, Basic Books, New York, NY, 2008.

Rentfrow, P.J., Gosling, S.D., Psychology of Music, 35, 306-326, 2007.

"Music Sales in the US by Genre," MSN Encarta.