Adolescents’ Music Tastes in the Streaming Era: The Case of Belgium

Abstract

The sociological literature about music considers youth as a crucial period for the development of one’s music tastes and identity. Yet, scarce research has documented the taste profiles of adolescents and their composition in relation to identity characteristics, especially in the current streaming era. In this article, we integrate different strands of literature analyzing the role of music tastes in identity building to define and segment the composition of contemporary adolescents’ taste profiles. We employed data from a cross-sectional study among Belgian adolescents ( n = 533, Mage (SD) = 15.3 (1.6), 61.1% girls, 83.2% Western European) and used latent class analysis to derive their taste profiles. Multinomial logistic regression subsequently segmented the socio-cognitive, social, and digital characteristics of these profiles. Our findings contextualize adult taste profiles among adolescents and the streaming landscape, shedding light on cultural tastes as gendered technologies of self-presentation.