
How well does music predict your politics? - marcelcor
http://notes.variogr.am/post/26869688460/how-well-does-music-predict-your-politics
======
DanielBMarkham
I usually don't like stories along the lines of "scientists correlate brain
size with political party" but I liked this one. I'm just not sure there's
anything meaningful here.

Most folks in the states know that Democrats are by and large young, city
folks. Republicans are older people who live in rural areas (fly-over
country). So it's not very surprising that Republicans like country music and
Democrats like younger pop music.

Two things stuck out. One, that Pink Floyd listeners trend Replubican! Who
knew? Second, that Democrats have a much more diverse taste in music than
Republicans (not news, probably, but interesting).

~~~
jbooth
Seriously, Pink Floyd? Maybe it's a case of age outweighing the lyrical
content and the overall cultural bent of the music?

I'd have accepted the beatles-ish even split, since everyone likes Pink Floyd
and the Beatles even though both are very counter-culture. But leaning
Republican is just plain weird for the band that made "Us and Them", "Another
brick in the wall", "Have a cigar", etc.

~~~
brianwhitman
I was very upset when I saw that result but a good scientist never shows his
bias :(

I do really think that once we get better at "artist evolvement" (separating
Pink Floyd into two or three separate artists as they had very distinct
phases) the PF signifier will drop. I only listen to Syd and "It Would Be So
Nice" era PF and definitely am not a Romney booster.

~~~
waterlesscloud
Everybody becomes The Man over time. The CEOs of today were getting stoned in
their dorm rooms in the 70s and 80s.

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bambax
> _Artists whose fans are most correlated to Republican_

> _Artists whose fans are most correlated to Democrat_

I'm French. I have never heard of the first _eight_ artists listed as
Republican friendly; I know and am familiar with most artists in the Democrat
list (all but two).

Do "Republican artists" target something very American that doesn't appeal to
an international audience?

~~~
DanielStraight
All those artists are part of a genre we in America call "country music". It
is basically the modern, more pop-like evolution of the music of artists like
Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, Hank Williams (senior), and Willie Nelson. And if
you haven't heard of _those_ artists, you should check them out. If you're
interested, the best modern country artist (in my opinion at least) is someone
not appearing on the list: Brad Paisley.

~~~
bambax
Oh, ok. I know and love Johnny Cash, Tammy Wynette et al. I don't know
existing country artists.

I would guess this "music analysis" is in fact a proxy for other predictors
such as location (inland / coastal regions) and age, no?

~~~
mason55
_age_

The first thing I thought was that I'd love to see this with age accounted for
as well

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msluyter
Coming from Texas, I didn't find the country/republican correlation at all
surprising. But here's my question: has it always been this way, or would this
be another example of "the Big Sort,"[1] where cultural and political
affiliations are becoming increasingly clustered and polarized?

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/The-Big-Sort-Clustering-Like-
Minded/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Big-Sort-Clustering-Like-
Minded/dp/0618689354)

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yuriyg
Yet another example of a fallacy of representing the political spectrum in one
dimension. People are being conditioned to thinking in terms of left-right,
good-bad, democrats-republicans; instead of in terms of real issues. While
entertaining, this article adds nothing of value to the political discussion.

~~~
meepmorp
Rather, its yet another example of people using a single, readily identifiable
feature to classify a data set.

It's not an article about politics. It's an article about binary classifiers.

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pvnick
Grooveshark's beluga project (<http://beluga.grooveshark.com>) reveals a lot
of the same patterns. Looking up Mormon tabernacle choir, for instance, shows
a high listenership of politically active, religious conservatives, while
people that listen to system of a down tend to be moderate liberals with less
political involvement.

Music demographics data is fascinating!

~~~
yoasif_
This is far more interesting than the linked article, mostly because it
actually shows data for the music that I listen to.

For example, Paul van Dyk, Three Drives, and Ferry Corsten all have "IT
Specialist / Programmer" as highly over-represented (wow!).

In addition, Tiësto (had to look up Tiesto) shows that advertising does in
fact, work! ... 92% of the listeners on Grooveshark uses Windows Live Spaces.

He was hired by Microsoft to sell Vista to the Dutch market:
[http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/04/15/music-tiesto-dc-
id...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/04/15/music-tiesto-dc-
idUSN1524677820070415)

Good find! :)

------
cletus
There are lots of things that predict your politics to varying degrees: age,
gender, sexual orientation, whether you have children, education, income, job,
where you live, to name a few. These can be used together to fairly accurately
predict at least whether you lean left or lean right.

In any given election in the US you have about 40% of the general population
who votes Democrat always, 40% who vote Republican always and 20% who decide
the election results. Even the massive landslides of Reagan in 84 and Nixon in
72 didn't go more than about 60-40.

Politics on a mass scale is so predictable that maps are produced of political
leanings that are used for redistricting.

A lot of these same factors can be used to predict music tastes. Age and where
you grew up are probably the two biggest. So don't make the mistake that many
in the press often do and mistake this for causation for correlation.
Correlation isn't surprising given the common factors.

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mindcrime
_Metal fans could save us all from a two-party system._

Hmm... I'm a huge metal fan myself, and very much an anarcho-capitalist /
libertarian / voluntaryist / $whatever_term_you_prefer. But, to be honest, I
haven't really noticed much correlation between a preference for metal, and
3rd party political affiliation, at least among my metal loving friends. If
anything, I'd say that metalheads perhaps run towards "politically apathetic /
don't care" more than other groups. But that's a pretty subjective and totally
non-scientific observation.

~~~
binxbolling
RTFA. Their conclusion was not that metal fans have a preference for 3rd party
affiliation.

~~~
mindcrime
Not strictly speaking, but if they say:

"I found it neat these non-predictive artists were mainly metal. Perhaps the
genre that can finally bring this divided country together or break the lock
on the two party system."

then it's a small bit of inference to think that they are suggesting metal
fans are more likely to go for something other than the two incumbent parties.

Anyway, I'm generalizing a bit here. It's not always necessary to reply only
to the conclusions than the authors of an article explicitly drew.

------
jpwagner
should consider throwing in age distinctions. [old music-old people-
conservative] vs [new-music-young people-liberal] is neither interesting nor
exciting.

~~~
tokenadult
_[old music-old people-conservative] vs [new-music-young people-liberal] is
neither interesting nor exciting._

Indeed. The saying attributed to Winston Churchill (he didn't actually say it)

<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/List_of_misquotations>

<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill#Misattributed>

"Show me a young Conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart. Show me
an old Liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains." is a familiar
statement that people change their political opinions over the course of life.
I might add that most observers of politics in the United States think neither
"conservative" nor "liberal" are useful terms for describing where people fit
in United States politics.

For the record, my radio presets in my car are to "classic rock" stations (of
which there are usually at least two at any one time in my town) and most of
the music I rip to my computer is similarly music that was top-airplay pop
music for the Baby Boom. When the Baby Boomers were young, that was probably
considered somewhat radical, antiestablishment music, but I've been surprised
at how many of my contemporaries have grown up into middle-aged people who
might be characterized as "conservative" politically active voters today,
while keeping the same musical tastes.

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JackFr
Some non-normalized results might be nice. If the sample size of Republican-
leaning vs. Democrat-leaning are orders of magnitude different, then the
diversity of taste comparison is questionable.

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trotsky
It looks a bit like you're matching location to both traits:
country/republican to rural/lower density and pop/hiphop/democrat to
urban/coastal

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juan_juarez
Pretty predicible - modern country music is pretty much pandering to right-
wing values. It's not really any different than rap - it's just a matter of
who your demo is; inner city black youth with baseball hats or middle-American
farm boys with cowboy hats. Either way, it's music marketed toward
marginalized, uneducated people that need to cling to some sort of social
identity to feel empowered.

...why do YOU know so many people that "like all music but rap and country"?
We're well-to-do, educated, white boys.

