The Melodies of Politics: Assessing a Correlation Between Music Taste and Political Views with Spotify

Abstract

Politics are a fundamental part of human society, and as such, studies have been done to attempt to find ways to predict one’s political views, particularly for advertising purposes. In recent years, politicians and political movements have begun to employ the use of popular music or musicians to accompany their causes and advertisements. Studies have been done in the past to determine whether or not a correlation exists between politics and music, yet most have fallen short in data collection or simply did not achieve any results with correlation. This study attempts to go beyond previous studies by using more accurate data reporting with Spotify’s API, which allows for data collection from a participant’s entire listening history on the platform. All of the programming, survey questions, excel formulas and instructions can be found at https://github.com/ajlacognata/researchspotifyapp if you wish to attempt to replicate this study.