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How well does music predict your politics?
- msluyter 14y agoComing from Texas, I didn't find the country/republican correlation at all surprising. But here's my question: has it always been this way, or would this be another example of "the Big Sort,"[1] where cultural and political affiliations are becoming increasingly clustered and polarized? [1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Big-Sort-Clustering-Like-Minded/dp/0618689354 http://www.amazon.com/The-Big-Sort-Clustering-Like-Minded/dp...
- pvnick 14y agoGrooveshark's beluga project (http://beluga.grooveshark.com http://beluga.grooveshark.com) reveals a lot of the same patterns. Looking up Mormon tabernacle choir, for instance, shows a high listenership of politically active, religious conservatives, while people that listen to system of a down tend to be moderate liberals with less political involvement. Music demographics data is fascinating!
- yoasif_ 14y agoThis is far more interesting than the linked article, mostly because it actually shows data for the music that I listen to. For example, Paul van Dyk, Three Drives, and Ferry Corsten all have "IT Specialist / Programmer" as highly over-represented (wow!). In addition, Tiësto (had to look up Tiesto) shows that advertising does in fact, work! ... 92% of the listeners on Grooveshark uses Windows Live Spaces. He was hired by Microsoft to sell Vista to the Dutch market: http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/04/15/music-tiesto-dc-idUSN1524677820070415 http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/04/15/music-tiesto-dc-id... Good find! :)
- jpwagner 14y agoshould consider throwing in age distinctions. [old music-old people-conservative] vs [new-music-young people-liberal] is neither interesting nor exciting.
- stoic 14y agoAnother Texan checking in. It's worth pointing out that the artists listed in the red box do actually have younger fans (Kenny Chesney, Jason Aldean, Blake Shelton). Surprised to see no mention of Radiohead...
- kokey 14y agoI think age is probably the most important. Second to that, I suspect a higher portion of the data set being on the Democrat side. Both factors are so strong that they have old sayings about both.
- tokenadult 14y ago[old music-old people-conservative] vs [new-music-young people-liberal] is neither interesting nor exciting. Indeed. The saying attributed to Winston Churchill (he didn't actually say it) http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/List_of_misquotations http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/List_of_misquotations http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill#Misattributed http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill#Misattributed "Show me a young Conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains." is a familiar statement that people change their political opinions over the course of life. I might add that most observers of politics in the United States think neither "conservative" nor "liberal" are useful terms for describing where people fit in United States politics. For the record, my radio presets in my car are to "classic rock" stations (of which there are usually at least two at any one time in my town) and most of the music I rip to my computer is similarly music that was top-airplay pop music for the Baby Boom. When the Baby Boomers were young, that was probably considered somewhat radical, antiestablishment music, but I've been surprised at how many of my contemporaries have grown up into middle-aged people who might be characterized as "conservative" politically active voters today, while keeping the same musical tastes.
- bambax 14y ago> Artists whose fans are most correlated to Republican > Artists whose fans are most correlated to Democrat I'm French. I have never heard of the first eight artists listed as Republican friendly; I know and am familiar with most artists in the Democrat list (all but two). Do "Republican artists" target something very American that doesn't appeal to an international audience?
- brianwhitman 14y agoMaybe, would be cool to try it on location data! As I stated in there, we only used TPs that had US set as location, so the data will be very US-focused.
- mediocregopher 14y agoMost of those "republican" artists are country music artists, while most of the "democrat" artists are pop/rap (although it's easy to confuse the two these days). I would expect the rest of the world would not find country music as appealing as pop.
- ajross 14y agoHonestly, modern "country" is "pop". They're distinguished demographically (country artists and fans skew more white and rural than the general US population) and geographically (Nashville vs. LA as the centers of the business), not so much musically. Other than a handful of tells (the accent in which the music is sung, the occasional use of slide guitar or fiddle) there's very little difference.
- DanielStraight 14y agoAll those artists are part of a genre we in America call "country music". It is basically the modern, more pop-like evolution of the music of artists like Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, Hank Williams (senior), and Willie Nelson. And if you haven't heard of those artists, you should check them out. If you're interested, the best modern country artist (in my opinion at least) is someone not appearing on the list: Brad Paisley.
- mindcrime 14y agoMetal fans could save us all from a two-party system. Hmm... I'm a huge metal fan myself, and very much an anarcho-capitalist / libertarian / voluntaryist / $whatever_term_you_prefer. But, to be honest, I haven't really noticed much correlation between a preference for metal, and 3rd party political affiliation, at least among my metal loving friends. If anything, I'd say that metalheads perhaps run towards "politically apathetic / don't care" more than other groups. But that's a pretty subjective and totally non-scientific observation.
- tluyben2 14y agoIt is something I have noticed too though. That's why I personally didn't find it very surprising that they are hardest to classify.
- mason55 14y agoI would have liked a distinction between "this music could be either" and "this music didn't signify anything". Would help tease out the difference between political apathy and appeal to both parties
- binxbolling 14y agoRTFA. Their conclusion was not that metal fans have a preference for 3rd party affiliation.
- mindcrime 14y agoNot strictly speaking, but if they say: "I found it neat these non-predictive artists were mainly metal. Perhaps the genre that can finally bring this divided country together or break the lock on the two party system." then it's a small bit of inference to think that they are suggesting metal fans are more likely to go for something other than the two incumbent parties. Anyway, I'm generalizing a bit here. It's not always necessary to reply only to the conclusions than the authors of an article explicitly drew.
- yuriyg 14y agoYet another example of a fallacy of representing the political spectrum in one dimension. People are being conditioned to thinking in terms of left-right, good-bad, democrats-republicans; instead of in terms of real issues. While entertaining, this article adds nothing of value to the political discussion.
- meepmorp 14y agoRather, its yet another example of people using a single, readily identifiable feature to classify a data set. It's not an article about politics. It's an article about binary classifiers.
- trotsky 14y agoIt looks a bit like you're matching location to both traits: country/republican to rural/lower density and pop/hiphop/democrat to urban/coastal
- juan_juarez 14y agoPretty predicible - modern country music is pretty much pandering to right-wing values. It's not really any different than rap - it's just a matter of who your demo is; inner city black youth with baseball hats or middle-American farm boys with cowboy hats. Either way, it's music marketed toward marginalized, uneducated people that need to cling to some sort of social identity to feel empowered. ...why do YOU know so many people that "like all music but rap and country"? We're well-to-do, educated, white boys.
- juan_juarez 14y agoPretty predicible - modern country music is pretty much pandering to right-wing values. It's not really any different than rap - it's just a matter of who your demo is; inner city black youth with baseball hats or middle-American farm boys with cowboy hats. Either way, it's music marketed toward marginalized, uneducated people that need to cling to some sort of social identity to feel empowered. ...why do YOU know so many people that "like all music but rap and country"? We're well-to-do, educated, white boys.
- DanielBMarkham 14y agoI usually don't like stories along the lines of "scientists correlate brain size with political party" but I liked this one. I'm just not sure there's anything meaningful here. Most folks in the states know that Democrats are by and large young, city folks. Republicans are older people who live in rural areas (fly-over country). So it's not very surprising that Republicans like country music and Democrats like younger pop music. Two things stuck out. One, that Pink Floyd listeners trend Replubican! Who knew? Second, that Democrats have a much more diverse taste in music than Republicans (not news, probably, but interesting).
- jbooth 14y agoSeriously, Pink Floyd? Maybe it's a case of age outweighing the lyrical content and the overall cultural bent of the music? I'd have accepted the beatles-ish even split, since everyone likes Pink Floyd and the Beatles even though both are very counter-culture. But leaning Republican is just plain weird for the band that made "Us and Them", "Another brick in the wall", "Have a cigar", etc.
- brianwhitman 14y agoI was very upset when I saw that result but a good scientist never shows his bias :( I do really think that once we get better at "artist evolvement" (separating Pink Floyd into two or three separate artists as they had very distinct phases) the PF signifier will drop. I only listen to Syd and "It Would Be So Nice" era PF and definitely am not a Romney booster.
- jbooth 14y agoEven if you divide it, what do you get, the relativist, existentialist, anti-war and anti-corporate mainstream era contrasted with the full-on acid freak hippie Syd era? Both seem pretty culturally liberal to me.
- waterlesscloud 14y agoEverybody becomes The Man over time. The CEOs of today were getting stoned in their dorm rooms in the 70s and 80s.
- cletus 14y agoThere are lots of things that predict your politics to varying degrees: age, gender, sexual orientation, whether you have children, education, income, job, where you live, to name a few. These can be used together to fairly accurately predict at least whether you lean left or lean right. In any given election in the US you have about 40% of the general population who votes Democrat always, 40% who vote Republican always and 20% who decide the election results. Even the massive landslides of Reagan in 84 and Nixon in 72 didn't go more than about 60-40. Politics on a mass scale is so predictable that maps are produced of political leanings that are used for redistricting. A lot of these same factors can be used to predict music tastes. Age and where you grew up are probably the two biggest. So don't make the mistake that many in the press often do and mistake this for causation for correlation. Correlation isn't surprising given the common factors.
- JackFr 14y agoSome non-normalized results might be nice. If the sample size of Republican-leaning vs. Democrat-leaning are orders of magnitude different, then the diversity of taste comparison is questionable.