There’s no doubt a person’s taste in music affects their social life. During your high-school years especially, the kind of music you listen to often determined what crowd you hung around with and whether or not you were accepted by certain social groups.
It stands to reason. After all, your taste in music says a lot about you, for better or worse. There’s a reason certain stereotypes are associated with certain types of music, because different types of music attract different kinds of listeners.
Whether you listen to pop music, indie rock, or heavy metal indicates where your other interests may lie – what kind of movies or fashion or art you like. But according to researchers from the University of British Columbia, your taste in music can also reveal how much money you earn.
As Yahoo Health reports, the study, which is sure to rile plenty of controversy, was published in a recent issue of the Canadian Review of Sociology. It included 1,595 adult participants living in either Toronto or the Vancouver metropolitan area.
Using telephone interviews, researchers questioned participants about their musical likes and dislikes. More specifically, they asked them to respond favourably or unfavourably to 21 musical genres, along with being asked to identify their most and least favourite.
The researchers then compared the results against the socio-economic background of the participants. Their findings indicated that members of different social classes are more inclined to like certain types of music.
Before we get to the results, it’s important to remember that there’s a lot more to our musical tastes than just class. Variables like age, gender, immigrant status, and ethnicity are just a few of the other components that shape our musical tastes.
Participants who were poorer and less educated were more likely to prefer:
Country
Disco
Easy listening
Golden oldies
Heavy metal
Rap
Meanwhile, the wealthier and better-educated volunteers were more into:
Classical
Blues
Jazz
Opera
Choral
Pop
Reggae
Rock
World and musical theatre
Speaking to Yahoo Health, study author Gerry Veenstra, PhD, Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, explained how the term “social class” was defined in their research. As it happens, Veenstra says he enjoys easy listening, musical theatre, and pop
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“Social class is a difficult, vague term and there are lots of ways of conceptualizing and measuring it,” he explained. He evaluated a number of philosophies and ended up “equating social class with socioeconomic status, which produced the main findings”.
The researchers also found that musical taste contributes to the division between classes. That is, what upper class people tend to like is usually disliked by the lower class, and vice versa. For example, those who were least educated were eight times more like to say “no way” to classical music compared to their more educated peers.
“Many different aspects of cultural life — music, sport, religion, food, etc. — are affected by social class, and so it’s perhaps not surprising that my measures of social class turned out to be empirically associated with my measures of musical tastes,” said Veenstra.
“However, each particular genre probably deserves its own dedicated study, though, in order to know why a given taste is structured by class.”
