The geography of music preferences

Considerable attention has been paid to America’s political and economic divides. These divides revolve around class and location, with more affluent, more educated and denser places leaning more open-minded and liberal and less affluent, less educated and less dense places leaning more conservative. We contend that such divides are also reflected and reinforced by preferences, attitudes and predispositions for culture. More specifically we argue that Americans’ preferences for music will reflect dimensions of these political and economic divides. To test this proposition, our research examines the geographic variation of five key categories of music preferences across 95 of the largest US metropolitan areas. We use factor analysis to identify and map geographic variation of musical preferences, and we use both bivariate correlation analyses and regression analysis to examine the associations between metro-level musical preferences and key economic, demographic, political, and psychological variables. We find that musical preferences generally reflect and reinforce America’s broader economic and political divides.