Music-genre identification in adolescents: An exploratory study

Over the past few decades, quantitative research on musical tastes and consumption has extensively relied on methods involving music genre labels. These methods generally assume participants to share a general and common label knowledge. However, such an assumption has not been empirically tested to date. The present study aimed to (a) estimate adolescents’ ability to identify music genres and (b) examine the influence of social factors on this ability. Results indicated that genre identification constituted a rather difficult task for a majority of participants. They also showed that genre identification depended on social class, age, musical background, and, to a lesser extent, on sex and the importance attached to music. All in all, the study findings further pinpoint the flaws pertaining to genre-based methods and invite sociology researchers to use complementary indicators of musical tastes in the future.