The musical field

Abstract

This article examines musical taste, as revealed by the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion survey. It shows that musical taste is highly divided and contentious, with large numbers of people intensely disliking certain genres of music. It shows the existence of two distinctive musical taste communities, one linking taste for rock, electronic, urban, world and heavy metal music, and the other linking classical music and jazz. Tastes for specific musical works do not easily map onto musical genres, and are less closely correlated with each other. Using logistic regression, it is shown that age and ethnicity in particular, and gender, educational qualifications and occupational class, strongly condition taste for both musical genres and works.