Yahoo! News wrote:The study concluded that jazz and classical music fans are creative with good self-esteem, although the former are much more outgoing whereas the latter are shy.

Country and western fans were found to be hardworking and shy; rap fans are outgoing and indie lovers lack self-esteem and are not very gentle.

Those who like soul music can take heart as the research concluded they are creative, outgoing, gentle, at ease with themselves and have a high self-esteem.

Here is the URL for that news: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080905/lf_ ... n_music_dc

Reactions? Discuss!

Are all people who love "punchy music" higher up in the income bracket, and vice versa? I think not. I'm definitely not.

Seems to me that Professor North and even more so, the writer, Michael Holden, make too many generalizations with the study's conclusions. Maybe most people who preferred a certain type of music also described those types of personality traits, but to conclude that all people who prefer indie "lack self-esteem and are not very gentle" is just wrong. True that North doesn't directly say that all lack self-esteem...but his statement implies all because he doesn't discriminate between indie lovers who lack self-esteem and those who don't. He just tacks on that set of traits to all indie music-lovers.

Also, we don't even know who's in the sample and if it's diverse enough or at all, nor how the personality questions were phrased and if they were biased or not. Guess the only way to find out is to join the study myself.

Sayeeda's right. The article was vague about how they got the results. I'm also curious as to what they mean by "preferred" a certain kind of music. I listen to some classical (both traditional and experimental), traditional jazz, blues, old-school Motown R&B, rock, pop, indie, salsa, standards, celtic, and other random music and I really like all of it. My "preference" such as it is shifts with my mood. There must be a lot of people like this. How would they classify people who like a wide variety of music? By what they don't like, which might be easier to define?

Still, it's interesting to consider. Thanks for posting the link, lune ellise. Can't wait to see what everybody else thinks.

you know it really irritates me that people waste their time on dumb studies like this. i admit some that sound dumb i think are interesting (like medicinal effects of music and soundwaves or something - i'm making that up by the way) but this is just so dumb. i mean people's taste in music is highly influenced by their surroundings (more country fans in the south for example)
anyways, i don't know how it is for these types of researchers but i know in other fields professors will get funding for research from industry or weird grant thingies (ok don't know much about this)

so if somebody actually spent money on this study that irritates me more.

On a related note: Scientific Attempt To Create Most Annoying Song Ever.