How well does music predict your politics?

I usually don't like stories along the lines of "scientists correlate brain size with political party" but I liked this one. I'm just not sure there's anything meaningful here.<p>Most folks in the states know that Democrats are by and large young, city folks. Republicans are older people who live in rural areas (fly-over country). So it's not very surprising that Republicans like country music and Democrats like younger pop music.<p>Two things stuck out. One, that Pink Floyd listeners trend Replubican! Who knew? Second, that Democrats have a much more diverse taste in music than Republicans (not news, probably, but interesting).

&#62; <i>Artists whose fans are most correlated to Republican</i><p>&#62; <i>Artists whose fans are most correlated to Democrat</i><p>I'm French. I have never heard of the first <i>eight</i> artists listed as Republican friendly; I know and am familiar with most artists in the Democrat list (all but two).<p>Do "Republican artists" target something very American that doesn't appeal to an international audience?

Coming from Texas, I didn't find the country/republican correlation at all surprising. But here's my question: has it always been this way, or would this be another example of "the Big Sort,"[1] where cultural and political affiliations are becoming increasingly clustered and polarized?<p>[1] <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Big-Sort-Clustering-Like-Minded/dp/0618689354" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/The-Big-Sort-Clustering-Like-Minded/dp...</a>

Yet another example of a fallacy of representing the political spectrum in one dimension. People are being conditioned to thinking in terms of left-right, good-bad, democrats-republicans; instead of in terms of real issues. While entertaining, this article adds nothing of value to the political discussion.

Grooveshark's beluga project (<a href="http://beluga.grooveshark.com" rel="nofollow">http://beluga.grooveshark.com</a>) reveals a lot of the same patterns. Looking up Mormon tabernacle choir, for instance, shows a high listenership of politically active, religious conservatives, while people that listen to system of a down tend to be moderate liberals with less political involvement.<p>Music demographics data is fascinating!

There are lots of things that predict your politics to varying degrees: age, gender, sexual orientation, whether you have children, education, income, job, where you live, to name a few. These can be used together to fairly accurately predict at least whether you lean left or lean right.<p>In any given election in the US you have about 40% of the general population who votes Democrat always, 40% who vote Republican always and 20% who decide the election results. Even the massive landslides of Reagan in 84 and Nixon in 72 didn't go more than about 60-40.<p>Politics on a mass scale is so predictable that maps are produced of political leanings that are used for redistricting.<p>A lot of these same factors can be used to predict music tastes. Age and where you grew up are probably the two biggest. So don't make the mistake that many in the press often do and mistake this for causation for correlation. Correlation isn't surprising given the common factors.

<i>Metal fans could save us all from a two-party system.</i><p>Hmm... I'm a huge metal fan myself, and very much an anarcho-capitalist / libertarian / voluntaryist / $whatever_term_you_prefer. But, to be honest, I haven't really noticed much correlation between a preference for metal, and 3rd party political affiliation, at least among my metal loving friends. If anything, I'd say that metalheads perhaps run towards "politically apathetic / don't care" more than other groups. But that's a pretty subjective and totally non-scientific observation.

should consider throwing in age distinctions. [old music-old people-conservative] vs [new-music-young people-liberal] is neither interesting nor exciting.

Some non-normalized results might be nice. If the sample size of Republican-leaning vs. Democrat-leaning are orders of magnitude different, then the diversity of taste comparison is questionable.

It looks a bit like you're matching location to both traits: country/republican to rural/lower density and pop/hiphop/democrat to urban/coastal

Pretty predicible - modern country music is pretty much pandering to right-wing values. It's not really any different than rap - it's just a matter of who your demo is; inner city black youth with baseball hats or middle-American farm boys with cowboy hats. Either way, it's music marketed toward marginalized, uneducated people that need to cling to some sort of social identity to feel empowered.<p>...why do YOU know so many people that "like all music but rap and country"? We're well-to-do, educated, white boys.