Actually, I have had this question since I was in junior high school. What factors influence people’s music preferences. When I was in junior high school, I often made friends through music. In the process of constantly searching for the music I like, I found that peers around me often like the same type of music, and the change in the type of music I like often follows a pattern or a route. This makes me curious as to why this is the case and why everyone likes the same type of music.
When I was in high school, everyone's favorite music gradually became different, but it was obvious that some people liked this type of music, and others liked another type of music. These people had sexual nature, but this sexual nature was so vague that I couldn't describe it at all at the time.
Initial exploration
The first time I started researching and analyzing was when I was a sophomore in college. There was a course called Multivariate Statistical Analysis. The major assignment was to use SPSS software and use the knowledge of multivariate statistics. Find data and research yourself. I just came into contact with 02 google trends at that time, and I thought it was amazing. I didn’t expect that keywords searched on the Internet could be recorded in this way. So I decided to use google trends as a data source to do a study. At that time, my head was burning, and I remembered the problem in junior high school, so I started to explore it. A cluster analysis was performed by searching for "pop music", "rock music", "R&B", "electronic music", and "hip-hop music". The results shocked me. I found that Shanghai was in a separate category, Beijing and Guangzhou were in the same category, and other provinces were in the third category. This result makes me think that music preference is determined by some factors. But what are the factors, the economy? Education level? I don't know.
In-depth research
The next day I came to the UK. In my junior year, I took the time series course. I had to read books by myself, find data by myself, and finally get dissertation. Seeing others I couldn't find the interest to do economics or medicine, so I remembered the music research I had done before. Since I came abroad, I might as well see if others had related research. After several searches, unfortunately I couldn't find any books in the school library. There seemed to be books written about musical preference that were all neurological, and I wanted to look for more general influences. Searching on major paper websites, there are about 10 related articles, but there are very few researchers, and there are none in mainland China. It is really regrettable.
The following is the Literature Review found, I believe it can be of great help to your problem.
Literature Review
1. The first recommended article is The Do Re Mi's of Everyday Life: The Structure and Personality Correlates of Music Preferences by Rentfrow & Gosling (2003). The articles include On page 21, they first used factor analysis to divide music into four categories:
Reflective and complex: Blues, Jazz, Classical and Folk.
Intense and rebelling: Rock and Alternative.
Upbeat and conventional: Country, Sound Tracks, Religious and Pop.
Energetic and Rhythmic: Hip-hop, Soul, Electronica.
Later subjects They are also various groups of people in the United States, including African American, Asian, Hispanic and White. After some investigation, they used the chi-square test to draw the following conclusions:
1. Openness and reflective and complex It is positively related to the preferences of intense and rebellious.
2.Social Dominance is negatively related to Reflective and complex, Upbeat and conventional, Energetic and Rhythmic.
3.Politically conservative is positively related to Upbeat and conventional.
4. Intelligence is positively related to Reflective and complex, Intense and rebelling.
2. C.North and J.Hargreaves have published many articles.
Their 2007 study found that people's different life backgrounds affect people's music preferences. Gender, race, and age all have statistically significant effects. At the same time, they also paid attention to people's economic status. Whether people rent or own homes also affects their music preferences.
3. F.Pettijohn II and F.Sacco,JR. published a study on general music preferences in the United States in 2009. They collected Billboard's number one singles from 1955 to 2003 and found that during times of generally poor economic conditions, people preferred songs with meaningful lyrics, longer duration, and more romance.
4. There are also some studies on China, but they are very rare. These studies come from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. Wai-chung Ho (2001) found that male and female students in high school have different music preferences. Girls prefer listening to Western classical music and Chinese folk music. A survey by Hui-Ling Lai (2004) found that Taiwanese people have no preference for playing different musical instruments.
The above research is mainly a cross-sectional study, that is, a study of music preferences at the same time. There are very, very few longitudinal studies, that is, studies on music preferences over time. I don’t know if you friends feel it, but the weather and season may also affect your music preferences at that moment. The following article is about this.
5. F.Pettijohn II, M.Williams and C.Carter conducted a study on seasonal factors in 2010. Their research is based on the factor analysis of Rentfrow and Gosling, which is the music type that is divided into four categories in the first article I mentioned. They conducted two experiments in total. In the first experiment, participants came from a university in the southern United States. Participants were asked to read an article that depicted common local scenes during a certain season to simulate seasonal factors. After reading, participants were asked to report whether the article matched their experiences and to choose a genre they would like to hear during that season. The second experiment was similar to the first, except that instead of reading an article, participants wrote an article describing what they saw during that season.
For the first experiment, they found that participants preferred complex and reflective music in winter, but they preferred energetic and rhythmic music in summer. For the other two types, participants did not differ between summer and winter. It is a pity that the results of their first experiment did not hold true in the second experiment (statistically not significant). This may be because their method of simulating seasons is inappropriate. However, long-term investigation of people's preferences for music is indeed difficult to achieve in terms of manpower and material resources.
The above articles are looking for different music preferences based on social factors. I am not yet able to summarize the research from biology and psychology. The more professional ones are the above. If you are still interested in reading my research, please continue reading.
Since the above research on seasonality is not very clear, and there are too few studies on China, I want to use time series analysis to study the seasonal factors of popular music in China. This time, Google Trends and Baidu Index are used. The combination of the two search engines should be more comprehensive. The data is monthly data from 2006 to 2011. It is very obvious that electronic music, pop music, rock music, and classical music are the most popular. The seasons of welcome are different. People do like different music in different seasons. And what’s even more amazing is that for classical music, both Google Trends and Baidu Index show a very strong 6-month periodicity. In fact, I have this feeling before. When I don’t listen to classical music for some days, I will suddenly want to listen to it at a certain period of time. Unexpectedly, this data confirms this.
The research on music preferences is roughly as follows. To sum up, there are people's personalities (personalities have detailed descriptions and classifications. For details, see the article by Rentfrow and Gosling, which is a long and well-written article.), age , gender, race, individual economic status, general economic status, season. These articles can all be found on the Internet based on the reference literature. I don’t care if I want them. I hope that more and more people will like to study music preferences.
Author: Zou Rijia