Daily ASCAP Brief

How Much Is Your Taste in Music Based on What Your Friends Like?

Do you think it’s possible that you might think you like certain bands only because your friends tell you they’re awesome, not because you actually enjoy their music? Have you ever used Pandora, the internet radio service that uses algorithms to guide you to music you might previously have thought you hated?

In the Sunday Magazine, an article called “The Song Decoders” examines how Pandora works to “strip to parts and reverse-engineer” your favorite songs by examining their acoustic elements. It also questions how much we’re influenced by other people’s tastes:

Pandora’s approach more or less ignores the crowd. It is indifferent to the possibility that any given piece of music in its system might become a hit. The idea is to figure out what you like, not what a market might like. More interesting, the idea is that the taste of your cool friends, your peers, the traditional music critics, big-label talent scouts and the latest influential music blog are all equally irrelevant. That’s all cultural information, not musical information. And theoretically at least, Pandora’s approach distances music-liking from the cultural information that generally attaches to it.

Which raises interesting questions. Do you really love listening to the latest Jack White project? Do you really hate the sound of Britney Spears? Or are your music-consumption habits, in fact, not merely guided but partly shaped by the cultural information that Pandora largely screens out — like what’s considered awesome (or insufferable) by your peers, or by music tastemakers, or by anybody else? Is it really possible to separate musical taste from such social factors, online or off, and make it purely about the raw stuff of the music itself?

Students: Tell us about your favorite artists and what you think they might have in common musically. How much do you think your friends influence your taste? Do you think a service like Pandora could correctly choose music you would love?
By The Learning Network