PRIVATE VS. SOCIAL MUSIC PREFERENCE FORMATION

Abstract

People often bond over shared taste in music, and music is one of the most popular conversation topics among new acquaintances. However, listeners generally keep some of their musical preferences private. The current study explored the factors associated with why listeners consider some of their preferred songs to be guilty pleasures. Forty-two Spotify users ranging in age from 18 to 24 were recruited from a small liberal arts college in the northeastern United States. A survey was administered online via Qualtrics. Participants were asked to examine a personalized Spotify playlist of the 100 songs that they listened to the most in 2017. They were asked to identify the first three songs on their playlist that they considered to be private preferences as well as the first three songs that they regard as public musical preferences. They evaluated each song by rating their level of agreement with each of 15 statements about the song. A stepwise linear regression was used to determine which factors distinguished private from public preferences. Three significant predictors accounted for a total of 21.9% of the variance in the data. Privately preferred songs were rated as less socially acceptable and as having less musical complexity than the publicly preferred songs. Private preferences were also associated with genres that were inconsistent with how the participant wished to be perceived by their peers. These results underscore identity management as the defining factor in determining whether a song is viewed as a guilty pleasure. Genre and musical complexity may relate to whether a musical preference is revealed publicly or kept as a private indulgence.

Keywords: Guilty Pleasure, Music, Music Preference