Your taste in music is an integral part of your individual identity. Our tastes, preferences, and favourite bands are almost as individual as our fingerprints. But what else can our music tastes tell us about ourselves? Can they predict our polticial affiliations, or our tastes in things like movies?
According to world’s leading music intelligence company The Echo Nest, the answer is a resounding yes. Echo Nest provide the largest repository of music data in the world – over a trillion data points on over 30 million songs, and their data is used by EMI, eMusic, MOG, MTV, Nokia, Rdio, Spotify, Twitter, and more reports Alan Cross.
In a pretty interesting experiment, Echo Nest decided to mine their data and found that you can in fact predict someone’s movie taste based on their music taste. They correlated music and movie preferences of 50,000 people, then applied all of the data points they maintain about music preference through their Taste Profiling technology, to identify associations among preference types, and ultimately to find out where those associations are strong enough to be predictive.
So what did their research uncover? Well firstly, fans of romantic comedies also like artists who sing about relationships and intimacy. Reba McEntire, Beyoncé, Usher, Céline Dion, and Jennifer Lopez all top the rom com list of favourite music artists.
That seems pretty obvious, but what about fans of country music? No prizes for guessing that their favourite genre of film are Westerns, with fans of Clint Eastwood and John Wayne most lilkey to also favour George Strait, Kenny Chesney, and Reba McEntire.
After looking at some obvious comparisons, Echo Nest decided to really test out their new system. They found that artists whose career started around 1996 were most beloved by fans of Twilight, but artists whose career began in 1981 were most beloved by fans of movies who won the Best Picture Oscar in the past decade.
In addition, people who agree with The Academy’s Best Picture choices were also likely to be fans of Grunge, Alternative Metal, and Metal – whereas fans of drama and comedy were most likely to be fans of Country, Pop, and RnB.
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If you’re more into a crime thriller, you probably have a soft spot for The Beatles, Jay-Z, Bob Dylan, or Pink Floyd. Conisserours of films of the more “adult variety” are also probably listening to Linkin Park, Deftones, Limp Bizkit, and Rage Against the Machine.
And in case you were thinking that all nerds have similar taste in music, you’d be wrong there too. Based on the top 20 artists for fans of each music genre, Echo Nest found that Sci-Fi fans have more diverse musical taste than Fantasy fans do.
Fantasy movie buffs have fairly middle-of-the-road Musical Identities, fans of Usher, Rihanna, Avril Lavinge. While Sci-Fi fans are a more eclectic bunch, musically speaking, with a heavy classic rock bent such as Jimi Hendrix, Aerosmith, and Lady Gaga.
For the full rundown on the results you can read more at Echo Nest’s blog.
Echo Nest plan to use their discovery to help advertisers wanting to target their campaigns more effectively. So next time you’re listening to your favourite artist on Spotify and an ad for a film you like to look of comes on, you’ll know that it’s probably more than a coincidence.
