Unlike the last entry with this title, this is (tangentially) a post about Roxy Music.

Last week, I was having a look at Tony Bennett, Mike Emmison and John Frow’s 1999 book, Accounting for Tastes in my QUT Creative Industries postgrad class. Bennett et al were doing something similar to Pierre Bourdieu in Distinction, mapping the social patterning of cultural taste. But unlike Bourdieu’s work on France in the early 60s, the data their team collected in Australia in 1994/5 showed social status/education level, age and gender to be more powerful predictors of taste than social class.

The chapter on music was particularly interesting - for instance, they found only 1.6% of respondents aged 18-25 and 4.0% of those aged 26-35 nominated classical music as their preferred genre, while 11.3% of the 60+ cohort did. As Bennett et al correctly surmised, without longitudinal data you can’t tell whether there’s a cohort effect (that is to say - older respondents liked classical music in their youth and continued to have that preference) or whether musical tastes change with age. But their qualitative interviewing found a lot of stability in music preferences over time - that is to say, people still liked the same or similar music as they grew older. (more…)