Rock, hip-hop, techno, jazz… labelling by genre is a common practice when it comes to describing music. Yet, while styles and genres play a vital role in the economics of the music industry for identification and promotion, they don’t always sit right with fans.

According to a recent study, music listeners often fail to recognise their tastes in these types of classifications.

The study in question was conducted by Anne Siebrasse and Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann from Germany’s Max Planck Research Institute in Frankfurt, published in the journal “Frontiers in Psychology”. It sought to determine how music fans perceive genres and, above all, whether they identify their tastes with them.

To that end, the experts devised a questionnaire to assess the tastes of 2,086 German music lovers for sub-genres associated with five major musical styles: European classical music, electronic dance music (EDM), metal, pop, and rock.

This approach highlighted the different attitudes of respondents to the notion of genres and, in particular, sub-genres. Indeed, analysis of the questionnaires revealed the existence of four to six distinct “taste classes” among aficionados of the above categories.

Three of these classes liked all the sub-genres associated with the particular musical style to roughly the same degree (“very much”, “moderately” or “rather less”). The other taste classes differed in their liking or disliking of sub-genres, either easier or harder to process.

“Our analyses revealed that people who like the same genre can have very different tastes if asked which sub-genres they like,” Siebrasse said.

Beatles vs Rolling Stones

The results show just to what extent fans of the same musical style should not be perceived as a homogeneous group. They also highlight the importance of socio-demographic factors such as age, gender or education, and personality traits in predicting music preferences.

For example, there is an “obvious” correlation between the age of pop fans and the pop songs they like: they tend to prefer those released when they were in their 20s.

All in all, while concepts of genre and style are now part of the common musical vocabulary, they don’t really capture the diversity of everyone’s musical tastes.

“When people talk about their musical tastes, they often use genre terms,” Siebrasse said. “However, while The Beatles and Rolling Stones fans would all be rock fans, they would probably see huge differences between them.”