What does your favorite music say about you?

The bedrooms of liberals reflected the residue associated with high openness. They contained a significantly greater number and variety of books — on travel, ethnic issues, feminism, and music, as well as a greater number and variety of music CDs, including world music, folk music, classic and modern rock, and "oldies." [Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You]

In a series of studies, Rentfrow, Gosling and their colleagues show that musical tastes powerfully predict people's personalities… By analyzing the preferences of almost two thousand people, they found four major dimensions along which musical tastes vary:

1) Reflective and Complex tastes for music, such as the blues, jazz, classical, and folk music, tend to indicate that a person is emotionally stable, open to new experiences, and has above average intelligence and verbal ability.

2) Intense and Rebellious tastes, including a like for rock, alternative, or heavy metal, tend to be shared by people who are open, athletic, and of above average intelligence and verbal ability.

3) People with Upbeat and Conventional taste tend to like country, sound tracks, religious music, and pop, and are usually agreeable, extroverted, conscientious, politically conservative, wealthy, athletic, with low openness, dominance and verbal ability. I always knew there was something suspect about pop-lovers.

4) Last, folks who like rap or hip-hop, soul, funk, electronica are said to have Energetic and Rhythmic tastes, and they are highly extroverted, agreeable, and athletic, tend to speak their minds, and are often politically liberal. [Sex, Genes & Rock 'n' Roll: How Evolution Has Shaped the Modern World]

The results of a multiple regression analysis of 49 metropolitan areas show that the greater the airtime devoted to country music, the greater the white suicide rate. ["The Effect of Country Music on Suicide” from Social Forces, Vol. 71, No. 1. (Sep., 1992), pp. 211-218]

Sapolsky found that most of us end up playing and loving the music we're exposed to when we're around twenty years old (or younger) for the rest of our lives, and that if a person is over the age of 35 when a new pop music style makes its mark, there's a greater than 95 percent chance he or she will never listen to it. After conducting similar inquiries about food and fashion, he concluded that our "window of openness" for new experiences, like getting our tongue pierced, slams shut at age 23 and our openness to trying out new foods (say, sweetbreads or calves' livers) pretty much closes for good at 39. [Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy]

The implications were clear: Whether or not a song became a "hit" was determined solely by whether it was perceived as already being popular. This is what I mean about the two-tier system: Whatever gains an early advantage in popularity will win. This may not seem so bad at first, but look at it this way: If we're duped into buying something just because it's popular (even if it isn't), think about all the great books or songs or CDs we might be missing simply because they weren't on that "top ten" list. [Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy]