“I guess that’s why they call it the blues”: Personality and the interplay between emotion and genre

Abstract

Research over several decades has demonstrated modest and moderately consistent relationships between personality and music preference, but has primarily relied on self-reported data and lab-based listening experiments. Recently, music preference research has begun to take advantage of online listening data from platforms such as Spotify and Last.fm to more directly link listening behavior to individual differences. This study extends this new line of research by investigating the associations between naturally occurring music listening behaviors and personality traits, utilizing listening data acquired from Last.fm. We examined social-tagging data by extracting tags related to musical genre and emotion from frequently listened tracks of each participant and clustered them into broader categories to study their association with OCEAN traits. We further evaluated preferences in terms of co-occurring genre and emotion tags and analyzed listening patterns over time to better understand natural patterns of listening as they relate to personality. Our results corroborated previous research, demonstrating a positive correlation between Extraversion and high-arousal music genres such as hip-hop and rap, while Openness was linked with jazz sub-genres. Several novel and nuanced associations were unveiled, such as Extraversion being associated with nostalgic hip-hop and jazz, and Neuroticism correlating with calming music from unconventional genres like shoegaze. Finally, we comment on existing music preference frameworks and their relevance to naturally occurring music listening behavior.