What Your Taste in Music Says About Your Personality

Researchers at Herriot-Watt University in Scotland have linked personality types to taste in music.

Classical music lovers are hardworking introverts, apparently.

Reggae fans, on the other hand, are said to be outgoing and lazy.

You can read all about it here.

Sounds like a bunch of silly stereotypes to me. But what do you think?

Sounds like garbage to me. I love Motley Crue and in the next moment I can get into a classical piece.

It says that Rock/Heavy Metal means you have low self-esteem and are not hard working. That's just crazy. It sounds like my Dad wrote that considering he thinks rock guitarists have no musical talent and that they just produce noise.

A complete bunch of doggy -do.
What if a person appreciates all kinds of music?
I like my metal, and rock and pop... but right now I'm a middle aged white chick that listens to Hip-Hop..so what would the study say about that?
This time last year, I was all about goth, and death metal.
Good luck analyzing that.

Utter bollocks!

Being a 43 year old punk / skin who also listens to Indie / Ska / Northern Soul / 60's / old skool rave / original mod and mod revival / trance and techno / blues and various other music genres I can see this for what it is; pseudo intellectual claptrap from tossers wasting time and money existing solely in 'academia' instead of doing something worthwhile with their times.

It is my experience that authors of these types of studies are pretentious nomarks with absolutely no redeeming features and a complete lack of original or independant thought.

[edit on 5/9/08 by Freeborn]

Chart pop: high self esteem
Metal: low self esteem

Right there it proves its self wrong, it take more to go against the grain than with it.
I hereby pronounce the "article" and epic fail.

According to the survey results, I am a hard working, lazy, extroverted introvert, who is gentle and not gentle, who at ease and not at ease, and who is and isn't creative, with high self esteem and low self esteem.

A well thought out study....not!

I can easily go from listening to Incubus one minute to Berlioz the next. Didn't bother to even read the article. I don't need someone else telling me who I am, not even for entertainment purposes.

What a load of crap!

According to this, my traits are:
Low self-esteem
creative
not hard-working
not outgoing
gentle
at ease

Utter tripe, if you ask me. I'm plenty outgoing... hard-working? Yes... most of the time! And I'm pretty sure I have a lot of self-esteem.

How about the fact that I love, LOVE, LOVE Symphonic Death Metal?! Heavy metal (I effing hate that term!) mixed with classical... That alone makes their results worthless.

Hilarious. Thanks, Astyanax. I'm sure you didn't expect anyone to think this study was anything but garbage. To me, it's another example of the corruption of the academic world by commercial principles...

He said: "We have always suspected a link between music taste and personality. This is the first time that we've been able to look at it in real detail. No-one has ever done this on this scale before."

Prof North said the research could have many uses in marketing, adding: "If you know a person's music preference you can tell what kind of person they are, who to sell to.

(Quotes are from the original BBC article you linked)

Yeah, marketing. I've worked, at a low level, for one of the larger market research companies in the UK, they do most of the big banks. The kind of mind required to take this BS seriously... you need to be able to ignore hugely obvious assumptions and loadings of the question. It's basically blinding yourself to the fact that you're asking questions to get the answers you want.

The fact that I, as so many other posters here, have tastes that span a variety of genres, seems to have been factored out of the results. But I can easily imagine the kind of methods they've used to reach such a cripplyingly banal and incorrect conclusion:

The study is continuing and Prof North, who is head of the university's department of applied psychology, is still looking for participants to take part in a short online questionnaire

Oh - remember it said "we have always suspected a link between musical taste and personality"? Two things: first, it makes me think that maybe this prejudice informed the choice of questions asked. Second, I doubt very much that I'm alone in having experienced huge shifts in my musical tastes over my lifetime - usually liking new stuff rather than learning to dislike old stuff. The obvious implication is that therefore my personality has changed too. Really?

For myself, I know that the way in which my tastes have evolved have had entirely to do with my evolution as a musician.

Actually, almost entirely. I grew up a classical music snob and then when I started to like pop, I became embarrassed about this, listening to the radio with an earphone (ouch! That dates me!) to avoid being caught. I should say that my parents were not classical snobs - they liked the pop music of their day, which for years I despised but now appreciate (although I now think the people they listened to were not exemplars of the genre).

In my teens I liked what most people around me liked: ROCK!! I sang in bands and started to learn to play guitar. Only on going to University and being exposed to a rather more heterogeneous musical environment did I start to enjoy funk: and hanging out with musicians I liked and respected brought me to jazz. Years later I started liking country, again because of seeing and hanging with some great players in that style.

So... yeah... it's marketing BS and the researchers at Herriott-Watt ought to be ashamed of themselves. If they really wanted to do something useful, they could look at what happens to people's brains as they learn music. That's much more enlightening, IMHO.

Utter nonsense! I'm a biology nerd, high self-esteem, and on the quiet/pacifist side of philosophical stuffs... I listen to emopunk, metal, electronic thrashy stuff, goth, industrial, and my personality is the evil opposite of their stereotypes.

S'amusing, tho. :