Private Vs Public Music Preferences

Abstract

The current study explored factors that may shape the social environments in which people choose to consume their music. Specifically, this study examined the factors that provide explanatory power for why listeners keep some of the songs that they like private--songs that they don’t readily admit to liking. Participants were asked to select two songs (from a playlist of their top 100 personal favorite songs) that they would not want others to know they listen to as well as two songs they are open to letting others know they listen to. This exploratory study investigated the features of the music that participants tend to keep private versus public (such as musical characteristics of the song, genre, and emotional qualities of the song) and how participants view that music with regards to their own identity, their peers, and how they’d like to be viewed by their peers. A nine-factor logistic regression model predicted 62.3% of the variance in the data. Songs that were kept private were those that participants viewed as relatively incompatible with how they’d like to be seen by their peers, had an emotion that was inappropriate for a social situation, and were inappropriate for parties. Participants were more likely to listen to songs in private than in public if the artist had been involved in a scandal or if the song reminded them of the past. Pop songs were also more likely to be kept private. And although participants tended to keep their preferences for popular artists private, songs that were overplayed--according to the participants--were more likely to be shared publicly. Exploring the factors behind hidden musical preferences can provide insight into how musical preference is used for self-presentation and identity maintenance as well as the social pressures that people face to conform/ fit in with their peers.