What Does Your Music Taste Say About Your Personality? Experts Weigh in

You turn up the tunes when you work out, crank them up while you're stuck in traffic, and have them playing softly as you drift off to sleep.

But have you ever stopped to wonder why you're so drawn to Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and Rihanna, while others are jamming out to Foo Fighters, Kendrick Lamar or Beethoven?

It turns out that your music taste can be a reflection of your personality — but experts disagree on whether this is a true connection or a tenuous one at best.

Is there a link between music preference and personality? Yes, says the leading researcher.

The idea that your personality traits define your musical preferences isn’t anything new. In fact, plenty of research suggests that certain personalities are indeed more likely to enjoy certain types of music.

“There's a solid link, and there are also the links that have been consistently found across many different studies,” says Dr. David Greenberg (PhD, MPhil, MA), psychologist, social neuroscientist, musician and founder of Chime Therapy. 

Dr. Greenberg is one of the forerunners in personality-based music research. His most recent study  examined the Western music preferences of over 350,000 people in 53 countries to determine whether there are universal preferences for certain types of music based on personality traits. He has also worked with Spotify, examining the listening habits of users over three months against a Big Five assessment for each participant.

Before we dive into the results of these studies, it's worth noting that, like most academic research, studies generally use the Big Five personality system to explore the link between music and personality. This system measures five core aspects of an individual’s personality: Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism.

It's also important to understand that not all of the studies have looked at the same thing. While many look at music genres — categories like rock, pop, rap, country and so on — when exploring the link between personality and music, others, including Dr. Greenberg, believe that linking personality type and genre is too broad.

“Genres aren’t meaningless, but they don't tell us all that much information about someone's musical preferences. If you, for example, prefer rock music, rock is a very large and ambiguous genre. It can mean Bob Dylan, or it can mean Bruce Springsteen, or it could mean the Beatles,” he says.

Greenberg prefers a more nuanced approach and looks at musical dimensions rather than genre. Dimensions are the characteristics of a song or piece of music — things like tempo, rhythm and melody — including whether a particular song is more intense, features a more complex structure or has a more rhythmic, upbeat style.

What the research says

So what have researchers like Dr. Greenberg found when it comes to the link between musical dimensions or genres and personality? Here are some key takeaways:

• Highly Extraverted people were more likely to prefer Contemporary musical styles with attributes like rhythmic, upbeat and electronic. 
• Highly Open people showed a preference for Mellow music (romantic, slow and quiet attributes), Intense music (loud, distorted and aggressive attributes) and Sophisticated music (complex attributes such as instrumental and improvisational music).
• People high in Conscientiousness reacted positively to Unpretentious music (music with uncomplicated, relaxing and unaggressive attributes, such as country) and had a negative correlation with Intense music.
• High Agreeableness was linked with a preference for low-arousal music and high depth music.
• People high in Introversion listened to more of a newly discovered artist’s catalog in the Spotify study, while Open people listened to “Discover Weekly” on Spotify more than other users.
• People with high Neuroticism preferred high-arousal music with negative emotions like heavy metal. Greenberg says it's because "they're using music as a way to reflect their inner angst or their inner anxiety; to an extent they're listening to music that reflects that anxiety and just perpetuates it more.” 

Forget personality type - your tastes are more about life experiences

While the research shows some interesting correlations between personality and musical preference, it's not the only reason why we find some songs incredible and others downright awful.

Dr Greenberg also found that females consistently preferred Mellow music (romantic, slow and quiet), while males preferred Intense music (loud, distorted and aggressive). However, males in the eastern hemisphere had different tastes to western males, which suggests that environmental and biological factors also have a role to play.

“Culture is also influential in terms of musical preferences,” says Greenberg. “In fact, some studies on newborn infants show that infants prefer the music of their own culture to the music of other cultures.” 

Dr. Bradley Vines, PhD, MBA and cognitive neuroscientist specializing in music emotion, perception and performance, thinks the research on personality and musical preferences to date actually points to a lack of connection between the two — "if you said it has to be a yes or no answer, I would lean more towards no than yes.” 

Vines points to a 2017 meta-analysis which shows little-to-no correlation between personality types and music preferences, including music attributes, across studies. A meta analysis is where you gather a lot of studies, and then do an analysis on the aggregated data.

He says that a correlation could only ever be an association, rather than a causal link, because music plays a functional role in people's lives. “By this, we mean the music serves you to achieve some end. As you're living your life, you're utilizing music to calm down, get excited, celebrate a certain event or create some excitement or energy to do something. Whatever music is doing, we may develop this repertoire of musical tastes that serve these functions.” 

In other words, it could be that your musical preferences are more skewed towards experience than personality — because music is part of the personal biography of our lives. “So you hear that sound, and you have heard this sound or something like it before, and it brings those experiences to mind,” Vines explains.

“It's like the way we develop a taste for food. You get your nutrients from the food available to you, and your body ends up liking food that it's getting its nutrients from, and you develop habits or patterns of eating that provide the nutrients you need. Similarly, that could be how we're learning to like music.”

Do your musical tastes change over time?

You probably already know the answer to this since it’s unlikely that you still rock out to whoever your favorite artist was at 13. But yes, your musical tastes can and do change.  

Greenberg acknowledges that preferences change the most during adolescence when you might have a higher preference for more Intense music. That's due to forming your identity and engaging in a bit of that infamous teenage angst. But you can still expect subtle shifts in musical tastes throughout the rest of your life.

This discovery may undermine the idea that it's your personality type that shapes your taste in music. After all, if your personality type stays roughly the same throughout your life, but your music tastes don't, then there can't be a direct link between personality and musical preferences, can there?

For Vines, this is another reason why your musical preferences have more to do with experiences than personality. Since we use music in our social interactions, and those interactions change over time — for instance, as we move from school into work life or become parents — the music we're exposed to changes, and the way we use music changes too. This change can lead to a shift in our music preferences over time.

But it's a complex topic. We know that certain personality traits are more likely to evolve as we get older, so it makes sense that your musical tastes might change too.

Bottom line? The jury's still out.

So, what does all this research and expert opinion mean for you?

Well, if we're going to take it at face value, then your musical tastes may in some part be a reflection of who you are as a person, but personality is just one of many ingredients. What you grew up with, your culture, your gender, big life events that caused you to feel a particular nostalgia when hearing a type of music, and how music has interwoven into the tapestry of your life all play a part. There's a full smorgasbord of reasons for why you dislike one genre while another makes you bop your head.