Abstract
Our contribution addresses popular music as essential part of media entertainment offerings. Prior works explained liking for specific music titles in ‘push scenarios’ (radio programs, music recommendation, curated playlists) by either drawing on personal genre preferences, or on findings about ‘cognitive side effects’ leading to a preference drift towards familiar and society-wide popular tracks. However, both approaches do not satisfactorily explain why previously unknown music is liked. To address this, we hypothesise that unknown music is liked the more it is perceived as emotionally and semantically expressive, a notion based on concepts from media entertainment research and popular music studies. By a secondary analysis of existing data from an EU-funded R&D project, we demonstrate that this approach is more successful in predicting 10000 listeners’ liking ratings regarding 549 tracks from different genres than all hitherto theories combined. We further show that major expression dimensions are perceived relatively homogeneous across different sociodemographic groups and countries. Finally, we exhibit that music is such a stable, non-verbal sign-carrier that a machine learning model drawing on automatic audio signal analysis is successfully able to predict significant proportions of variance in musical meaning decoding.
Highlights
Popular music, is one of the most prevalent types of entertainment content in everyday media use, especially in social media
On a societal level, we identified a dampening effect of too much prominence on popularity. As postulated, it is predominantly music’s perceived expression of affect and values that explain best why individual people enjoy previously unknown music played back to them (H4). When controlling for these effect clusters, preferences expressed by genre labels only explain a small residual portion of music liking (H1), feasibly representing associated non-musical stereotypes connected with genre labels
We found differences regarding the importance of specific musical elements when it came to different dimensions of musical expression
Summary
Popular music (in the broadest sense, encompassing ‘oldies,’ jazz and hits from the classical repertoire, based on the definition of Tagg, 2000), is one of the most prevalent types of entertainment content in everyday media use, especially in social media. It is nowadays predominantly consumed in push scenarios—socio-musical contexts, in which music is selected and played back for us by someone else (e.g., when listening to radio programs, curated playlists, DJ sets, in-store music, YouTube videos, shuffle-mode, and music in virtual worlds) or by recommendation algorithms. Theoretical models from music psychology and cultural sociology that successfully described musical preference dynamics in the past require re-examination (Brisson & Bianchi, 2019; Prior, 2013)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
