Analysis of This Study

The British Journal of Sociology 2008 Volume 59 Issue 1
Our favourite melodies: musical consumption and

teenage lifestyles1
Julian Tanner, Mark Asbridge and Scot Wortley
Abstract
The present study explores the determinants and lifestyle correletes of musical
preferences among a large sample of high school students in Toronto, Ontario.
Our work is informed by theory and research on cultural stratification and ado-
lescent subcultures. In terms of cultural stratification, we engage with Bourdieu’s
(1984) and Peterson’s (1996) conceptualizations of elite taste, while subcultural
theory encourages us to focus upon more dissenting tastes and to explore con-
nections between musical tastes and peer group activity. Our findings suggest
that racial and ethnic identity, school experiences and cultural capital are signifi-
cant sources of variation in musical tastes that loosely correspond to existing
typologies; they also confirm what has often been inferred – that musical tastes
and peer group cultural practices are closely linked. Our findings are then dis-
cussed in the light of current debates about the nature and dimensions of lis-
tening audiences for music.
Keywords: Youth; music; cultural stratification; subcultures; school; leisure
Introduction: cultural sociology and the study of popular music
The quantity of recorded music available in our environment has grown expo-
nentially over the past several decades (Trondman 1990; Roe 1999). Most of
what is listened to is pop or rock music, though the looseness of this catego-
rization conceals that fact that it is differentiation, not homogenization, which
characterizes the contemporary musical field. While musical likes and dislikes
are conventionally understood as matters of personal taste, social scientists say
otherwise and postulate intimate connections between social stratification and
cultural stratification. The most famous proponent of this position is now
Tanner (Department of Social Science, University of Toronto at Scarborough), Asbridge (Department of Community Health and
Epidemiology, Dalhousie University) and Wortley (Centre of Criminology, University of Toronto) (Corresponding author email:
Julian.tanner@utoronto.ca)
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2008 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online.
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,
MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2007.00185.x
118 Julian Tanner, Mark Asbridge and Scot Wortley
widely understood to be the late Pierre Bourdieu, who depicts culture as a

resource used by powerful individuals and groups to establish, maintain, and
reproduce their social status (Bourdieu 1984; Alexander 2003; Swartz 1997).
The present paper is concerned with the sources of variation in musical tastes
among young people and takes Bourdieu’s ideas and legacy as a starting point.
It relies on information collected from a sample of 3,400 high school students
in Toronto, Canada – one of the largest and most multicultural cities in the
world – between 1998 and 2000.
On the face of it, Bourdieu might be seen as an unlikely guide for an
investigation of this sort, since Bourdieu, the student of culture and author of
Distinction (Bourdieu 1984), has little to say about its most popular variants,
and even less about popular music (Bennett, Emmison and Frow 1999: 171;
Swartz 2003). On the other hand, it has been suggested that of all the cultural
fields, music is the one in which the traditional hierarchies and boundaries have
prevailed (Bennett, Emmerson and Frow 1999); musical taste might therefore
be regarded as a particularly sensitive measure of status characteristics and
cultural dispositions.
Moreover, the stratifying effects of music may be especially pronounced
among young people, the prime consumers of popular music, and those most
attuned to the often quite nuanced stylistic differences between and within
musical genres. They also spend a lot of time in school, an institution that
Bourdieu conceptualizes as a prime site of reproduction where family based
material and cultural resources are transformed into the credentials that
ensure that existing patterns of privilege and inequality are perpetuated
(Bourdieu 1977; Bourdieu and Passeron 1977). High school is often depicted
(and experienced) as a highly competitive, status conscious arena, where rank
and standing matter (Milner 2004). While consuming popular music, or pro-
ducing it (Bielby 2004), may at one time have been a uniformly low-status
cultural activity, those days have long passed; a reading of Bourdieu indicates
that in the course of stratifying students, schools are also shaping their musical
tastes (Roe 1983; DiMaggio 1984).
High school is also a catalyst for adolescent peer group activity – the large
body of research on which is another, and perhaps more obvious, influence
upon the present paper. This literature provides the now familiar observation
that peer groups provide their members with an identity and sense of
belonging different from, and sometimes in conflict with, that bestowed by
the family or sponsored by the school. While academically successful stu-
dents may eschew peer group activity, or orientate themselves towards adult
approved versions of it, the less successful embroil themselves in anti-school
subcultures in which popular music is used as a symbolic expression of rebel-
lion or resistance (Brake 1985; Roe 1999; Brown and O’Leary 1971;
Murdock and Phelps 1973; Gelder and Thornton 1997; Hall and Jefferson
1976; Hebdige 1979).
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2008 British Journal of Sociology 59(1)
Musical consumption and teenage lifestyles 119
British research on the social bases of adolescent musical taste cultures

began in earnest in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with class background and
school experiences emerging as crucial influences. Findings indicated a division
between older, academically oriented students from middle- class back-
grounds who declared a preference for progressive rock, and younger, more
ordinary adolescents from varied backgrounds and academic abilities who
favoured more mainstream pop (Murdock and Phelps 1973; Frith 1978a).
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, a similar pattern was reported
among Canadian adolescents, along with the identification of an association
between a taste for heavy metal rock and low school achievement and delin-
quency (Tanner 1981).
These findings hint at an emerging cultural hierarchy within popular music
– a legitimate preference for progressive rock juxtaposed to a more opposi-
tional interest in heavy metal.2 As such, they are generally consistent with
Bourdieu’s depiction of dominant and subordinate cultural tastes (as well as
a subcultural reading of heavy metal as a homologous fit with delinquent
lifestyles). However, connections to his work were not made fully explicit until
the publication of a series of investigations of young people and musical
consumption conducted in Sweden in the 1980s (Roe 1983; 1992; 1993; Johans-
son and Miegel 1992; Trondman 1990).
Over the course of several studies, Roe (1983, 1992, 1993) has deployed
Bourdieu’s ideas to chart connections between young people’s status origins,
educational experiences, and patterns of media use. An initial longitudinal
study (Roe 1983) conducted between 1976 and 1981, tracking a cohort of
students between the ages of 11 and 15, finds that social class, academic
performance, and grading practices, all affect commitments to school and
peers. While home background is initially crucial in shaping students’ behav-
iour and cultural tastes, the school becomes an increasingly autonomous
influence. By the age of 15, successful students report a preference for classical
music (as well as jazz and blues), with their less successful peers opting for less
respectable (punk, new wave and rock) musical genres, accompanied by anti-
school peer group orientations.
Roe also reports in this and subsequent research (Roe 1992) that students
who anticipate, and achieve (Roe 1994), more education, align themselves with
classical music (as well as jazz and blues), whereas those whose backgrounds
and (especially) school experiences had worked to suppress educational ambi-
tion preferred heavy metal. Musical preferences and occupational expecta-
tions are similarly linked. What is at work here, Roe (1983, 1992, 1994)
suggests, is a form of anticipatory socialization. Images of the future structure
cultural choices in the present (Willis 1977). Adolescents who envisage high
status as adults prepare for that outcome by aligning themselves with the
cultural traits they believe are most appropriate for their future status desti-
nation – a process that happens in reverse for the heavy metal fans.
British Journal of Sociology 59(1) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2008
Recasting Bourdieu: omnivores and univores in North America
Roe and his fellow Swedish researchers are,in part,also chroniclers of a putative
shift in the content of high cultural musical tastes.All acknowledge that, among
people who were young in the 1980s, jazz and blues had become musical
preferences of high school elites. As Trondman (1990) suggests, selective types
of popular music had been granted status, in Bourdieu’s terms, as legitimate
culture – they are seen as approximating the qualities and standards found in
classical music. That this is not just a Nordic, or European, phenomenon has
been made more apparent in research carried out in North America, beginning
with Michelle Lamont and her comparative study of the cultural habits and
lifestyles of males (1992) in France and the USA.Her insight was that high status
individuals in the USA achieve and maintain distinction in a different manner
from their French counterparts. Instead of restricting themselves to traditional
elite culture, they display their superiority by a willingness and ability to engage
with both highbrow and popular art forms. As a result, the boundaries of
legitimate culture have broadened. However, it is the work of Richard Peterson
and his colleagues that best illustrates this trend. Importantly, his subject matter
is music, his focus the changing nature of (adult) listening audiences (Peterson
1992; Peterson and Simkus 1993; Peterson and Kern 1996).
Peterson’s research shows that members of high status occupational groups
are more likely to report liking not only classical music and opera, but many
types of popular music as well. Indeed, he insists that this is how they announce
their exclusivity and distinctiveness. Rather than monopolizing a narrow
round of cultural pursuits and, concomitantly, dismissing everything else, they
hold a conspicuous appreciation of disparate musical tastes. The contemporary
signifier of wealth and status is not refined interests but polymorphous ones.
As Peterson (1992) puts it, yesterday’s snob has become today’s omnivore.
However, Peterson is reporting on more than just the expansion of upper class
musical taste. He also contends that low status individuals and groups, rather
than immersing themselves in an undifferentiated mass culture, involve them-
selves instead, more or less exclusively, in particular musical genres. Mass taste
is, therefore, anything but, as different groups of low status individuals listen to
different types of music – they have become univores. Not coincidently, the
types of music enjoyed by low status univores are themselves seen as low status
(e.g. blue grass, country and western, heavy metal, and rap). Crucially, those
same genres also comprise the types of music that even omnivores refuse to
listen to (Bryson 1996, 1997).
What is being described and explained here, let us not forget, is the recon-
figuration of adult musical taste.3 An obvious question, given that young
people routinely listen to more music than adults and are primarily responsible
for most musical innovation, is whether similar structures of omnivorous and
univorous taste are emerging among adolescents, similarly interpretable in
either old or new hierarchical terms, and explainable in terms of the effects of
class and schooling. The Swedish research cited earlier is certainly suggestive
of omnivorous tendencies among status achieving high school students in the
recent past. However, that research, apart from some consideration of socially
devalued (Roe 1995) heavy metal music and its discredited low status listeners,
has little to say about teenage univores. The Swedish studies, furthermore,
make little reference to race and ethnicity as potential sources of musical
differentiation. Likewise, Bourdieu’s observations about the correspondence
between social position and cultural consumption are based almost entirely on
the racially and ethnically monocultural society that was France in the 1960s;
hence his singular emphasis on class. The significance of a missing racial com-
ponent looms especially large when connected to rap, the rapid ascendancy of
which means that new facts of musical consumption need to be explained.
According to some admittedly journalistic accounts, we are currently wit-
nessing a revolution in musical taste – because rap has now eclipsed rock as the
musical choice of today’s teenagers.4 If this is the case, then the arrival of rap
is reversing a process of musical segmentation that has been in place for
several decades. Moreover, the very popularity of rap revives old ideas about
the integrative role of popular music. The contention that rap supplies young
listeners with a common culture echoes the original claim that rock ‘n’ roll had
become a shared musical priority of American adolescents during the Eisen-
hower era (Coleman 1961). Although there is a growing body of research on
rap (see, for example, Binder 1993; Krims 2000; Quinn 2005; Lena 2006), little
of it has been devoted to audience reception. Its absence makes it difficult to
know whether arguments about rap’s unifying effects are any more accurate
than Coleman’s pronouncements about rock were forty years ago (Murdock
and McCron 1976).5
In any case, we are not prepared to accept, at face validity, the argument that
a large audience for rap is necessarily a homogenous one. While not denying
the growing influence of rap among young people, it does not necessarily
follow that the music holds a universal meaning for all who listen to it. Rap has
been represented as both a value carrier of symbolic resistance to racial
inequity and injustice, and as a source of misogyny, rampant materialism, and
violent criminal behaviour (Rose 1994; Keyes 2002; Quinn 2005). The music’s
commercial success and multicultural appeal speaks to its growing acceptance,
even legitimacy, its links to crime and delinquency (with attendant moral
panic), signify the opposite. Whilst some youth may hear rap as protest music,
other less rebellious or resistant ones may enjoy it in combination with other
musical genres. Finally, there is also no compelling reason to believe that the
spread of rap has been at the expense of the development of other new
popular music forms, such as house, techno, and jungle, or the burgeoning club
culture of which they are a part (Thornton 1995). Indeed, their emergence has
been taken by some as evidence of a more postmodern youth culture in which
musical tastes have become more eclectic and individualized, no longer an

emblem of collective identity and hence not easily accounted for by subcul-
tural analysis (Thornton 1995; Bennett 2000; Muggleton 2000). We also note
that evidence of musical eclecticism counts against Bourdieu, in so far as it
suggests that musical taste is not structured, or at least not structured accord-
ing to familiar class related principles (Chan and Goldthorpe 2007).
The present study
The research upon which the present study is based was conducted at a time
when the field of popular music was changing – when rap had entered the
mainstream and new musical genres were emerging – and in a city, as noted
earlier, defined by its cultural diversity. It was also undertaken at a time when
the value and importance of education was becoming increasingly apparent –
when relationships between educational attainment and future life chances
were becoming ever closer, when the majority of Canadian youth, for the first
time, embarked upon some form of post-secondary education (Davies and
Guppy 2006). Schooling matters more now than ever before. How it matters,
and how social background matters, for young people and their musical tastes
is the focus of this paper.
Our initial task is descriptive, mapping out the musical likes and dislikes, and
combinations thereof, of our respondents. We then investigate the correlates of
the patterns thus identified. Cultural choices and practices are originally learnt
in the family and then reinforced by what happens at school. According to
Bourdieu, the process of class reproduction in school is largely carried out
through the workings of cultural capital. Young people begin school with
different family based endowments. Those with large endowments – students
from high status backgrounds – find their cultural practices rewarded with good
grades and placement in academically oriented programmes. Students without
those endowments – those from lower class backgrounds and less familiar with
the codes of middle-class culture – do less well in school, as is made clear to them
by the sorting and evaluating practices employed in schools.
While Bourdieu links cultural capital to social reproduction, empirical appli-
cations of the concept have found that it also facilitates social mobility as well.
Research by Paul DiMaggio (1982;see also DiMaggio and Mohr 1985) finds that
cultural capital, although vital to academic success in school, is less strongly tied
to parental background than Bourdieu supposes.The ambitions of talented, but
lower-class students may thus be served by their own involvement in the cultural
capital, a point reinforced by more recent American research indicating that
cultural capital has a positive effect upon grades and educational careers
regardless of whether it is inherited (via socialization) from parents or acquired
by students themselves (Aschaffenburg and Maas 1997).
We argue that high status origins, academic achievement, educational ambi-

tion and cultural capital lead to preferences for adult approved socially
respectable musical genres. Conversely, low status origins, academic under-
achievement, modest educational plans and lack of cultural capital, will result
in a preference for musical forms that school and the adult world disapproves
of and devalues. We also consider the possibility that musical taste is linked to
peer group activity.
In this regard, several studies have now demonstrated that subcultural pri-
orities developed in adolescence impinge, for better or worse, on attainments
in early adulthood. We know that involvement in delinquency has a detrimen-
tal effect upon the transition to adult work lives (Hagan 1991; Tanner, Davies
and O’Grady 1999). At the same time, research has also discovered that
participation in other peer driven cultural pursuits – the party subculture for
Hagan (1991) and the high school rock band for Bielby (2004) – may produce
positive long-term dividends, through friendships and contacts, for young men
in their later occupational careers. We propose that respectable tastes are a
basis for conventional behaviour, while disreputable and devalued ones are
central to more deviant peer groups.
There is also the issue of gender. The musical interests of female adolescents
have rarely been a focus of attention, even though they are known to to be
significant consumers of music (Coleman 1961; Frith 1978b; Murdock and
Phelps 1973; Roe 1999; Bielby 2004). Older research both decries the neglect
of girls from subcultural analysis, and notes the importance of bedroom culture
for young females excluded from more public, male dominated, youth cultural
activity (Murdock and Phelps 1973; Frith 1978b). The argument is that gen-
dered leisure leads to gendered media usage – girls, preoccupied with dating
and romance, engage with male ‘teeny-bop’ stars, boy bands, and softer, more
orchestrated, more mainstream versions of popular music (Christenson and
Peterson in 1988; Coleman 1961; Frith 1978b; Tanner 1981; Roe 1983), while
boys involve themselves in hard rock genres that reinforce masculine
identities. But most of this research is now several decades old: whether there
are gender differences in contemporay musical preferences remains an open
question.
Finally, what of the music itself? For Bourdieu, the meaning of culture
resides in its application – the purposes to which it is put (Bennett, Emmison
and Frow 1999: 9). He is more concerned with the fact of class differences in
cultural consumption than in the specifics of the cultural choices that make up
dominant and subordinate tastes. This leads to a view of the content of both
high status musical cultures and low status musical cultures as being essentially
arbitrary (and changeable). High status music is what high status individuals
listen to, while low status music is what those in subordinated positions listen
to and value. Currently, high status musical cultures include jazz and blues as
well as classical music and opera and, more generally, are omnivorous in form
(Roe 1983, 1992, 1993; Johansson and Miegel 1992; Trondman 1990; Peterson
1992; Peterson and Simkus 1993, Peterson and Kern 1996; Van Eijck 2001).
Conversely, previous research attests to the oppositional qualities embedded
in the hard rock tradition, particularly heavy metal (Tanner 1981; Roe 1983,
1992, 1993, 1999). However, whether heavy metal is the only musical genre
used in this manner remains to be seen.
We are now in a position to suggest hypotheses about what we expect to find
in our sample of Toronto high school students. First, the proliferation of
musical genres, the number of alternative ways of listening to music, and our
multicultural research site, all encourage us to believe that our high school
sample will be familiar with a variety of musical styles. As we have seen,
Peterson postulates that omnivorous taste has supplanted narrow, refined taste
as the defining cultural trait of American adults in elite positions.We expect that
a similar pattern is emerging among younger Canadian listeners. Moreover, we
believe that high status background, academic achievement, educational ambi-
tion and cultural capital, are likely to predict omnivorous musical tastes.
Second, although we do not anticipate finding large amounts of enthusiasm
for classical music and opera, jazz and blues, we do assume some constituencies
of support for those and related genres. We also anticipate that high status
background, academic achievement, educational ambition, and cultural
capital, are significantly related to a preference for such musical forms. Third,
students from more humble backgrounds, students who perform less well in
school, who have only modest educational plans, and are low in cultural capital
will, we predict, involve themselves in more oppositional and univorous
musical genres. Previous research suggests that hard rock, particularly heavy
metal, will be their musical choice. We see no reason why this tradition should
not be continuing among the present generation of low achievers and rebels.
However, we suspect that school counter cultures may have found another
musical focus as well, namely rap and hip-hop music.
Fourth, we anticipate that musical consumption is related to subcultural
behaviour. We expect an inverse relationship, net of other factors, between
musical clusters that include legitimate or respectable genres and peer leisure
activity, particularly its most delinquent manifestations. Conversely, we expect
that preference patterns that revolve around rap and heavy metal will be
directly related to peer leisure activity, especially its more disreputable versions.
Methods
Data
The data for this paper are drawn from the Toronto Youth Crime and Victim-
ization Study, a stratified cross-sectional survey of Toronto adolescents (Tanner
and Wortley 2002). Self-administered questionnaires were completed by 3,393

Toronto students between the ages of 13 and 18, from 30 Metropolitan Toronto
high schools in both the Catholic and larger Public school systems.As it does not
include high school dropouts, institutionalized youth (i.e. youth in prisons), and
street youth, it is a school sample and thus any generalizations speak only to the
experiences of school-based adolescents. Informed consent was given for par-
ticipation in the study. The overall response rate was 83 per cent.
Measures
Social background
The impact of students’ social backgrounds on musical preference is initially
examined in terms of demographic variables – gender, age, sex, race, and
ethnicity. The remaining background variables comprise indicators of the SES
characteristics of parents and respondents’ family situation. These include
measures of parental employment (labour force participation), subjective
social class (whether the respondent feels that they are poor, middle class, or
wealthy, as based on answers to the question ‘most of the time when growing
up, how would you describe your family’s financial or economic situation?’),
and parental educational attainment. We also employ a measure of family
intactness – whether or not respondents grew up in a two parent household
(either biological or step-parent).6
School measures
A second set of measures relates to educational attainment, experiences, and
expectations: self-reported grades (proportion receiving mainly ‘A’ grades),
skipping school, suspension from school, and educational stream. The alloca-
tion of students to different programs of study based on ability is a standard
organizational practice of North American high schools. Research consistently
finds that students from high status backgrounds are overrepresented in pro-
grammes that are more academic and students from low status backgrounds
are overrepresented in more vocational programmes. Although less rigid and
overt than in many European educational systems, and less likely to involve
radically differentiated curricula and credentials, stream allocation in Canada
structures future educational opportunities, channeling some students toward
post-secondary educational institutions, and others towards the labour market
(Davies and Guppy 2006). Stream allocation in our study is measured by a
dichotomy of academic versus non-academic stream. We also asked a more
evaluative question about the degree of importance that they attached to
education. Finally, we explored educational futures, by examining how much
and what sort of schooling a student expected to attain. Our measure asks
students to anticipate whether they would finish high school, or move on to

some form of post-secondary education, including community college, under-
graduate university degree, graduate university degree, or professional train-
ing (i.e. medicine, law).
Cultural capital
Our next independent variable is cultural capital.While mainly used in existing
research as an explanator of educational and occupational attainment
(DiMaggio 1982; Mohr and DiMaggio 1995; Robson 2003), it has also been
deployed to elucidate dispositions, or orientations, towards the arts (Swartz
1997). This is how it is applied in the present study – as a measure of how
different individuals and groups gravitate towards, or away from, particular
musical constellations. Our assumption is that familiarity with high cultural
pursuits provides students with a set of cues (Mohr and DiMaggio 1995) or
‘rules of the game’ (Aschaffenburg and Maas 1997) by which they can inter-
pret the meaning and significance of various popular music genres. This assists
young people to decide which musical genres to appropriate and include in
their listening repertoires and those that they are better off distancing them-
selves from (Trondman 1990). Knowing something about their involvements
with high culture might tell us about how high school students evaluate dif-
ferent genres of popular music. To address this issue we create a cultural
capital index of the frequency of involvement in seven activities that encom-
pass traditional highbrow pursuits. These activities include playing a musical
instrument, attending cultural events, going to the library, going to the sym-
phony or opera, going to the museum, reading a book for pleasure, and
involvement with hobbies. The sum of these seven items is standardized and
has an alpha of 0.65.
Peer group activity (fun and excitement, deviance and crime)

We propose that musical tastes are also a basis for peer group activity varied
according to its social acceptability. We distinguish between ordinary peer
leisure and riskier pleasures that, whilst not necessarily against the law, are
unlikely to be viewed very positively by parents or other adult authority
figures (Murdock and Phelps 1973; Hendry 1983; Riley 1987; Agnew and
Peterson 1989; Osgood et al. 1996). We also identify domains of explicitly
criminogenic leisure. Four indices of peer group activity were thus created: one
we call peer dominated leisure, one we term hedonistic leisure, one index of
drug use, and another an index of delinquency.
Our peer dominated leisure index captures the frequency of adolescent
involvement in seven friend-centred activities, including driving around in a
car with friends, visiting friends at their home, shopping with friends, hanging
out in malls with friends, hanging out on the street, friends visiting your home,
and hanging out in coffee shops (alpha = 0.72). We capture hedonistic leisure
with an index of the frequency of participation in four hedonistic adolescent
pursuits, kissing and fooling around, having sex, going to house parties or raves,
and going to bars or nightclubs (alpha = 0.79). Finally, we asked questions
about illegal behaviour. Indices were created based upon respondents’ usage
of four recreational drugs (alpha = 0.74) and involvement in eight forms of
delinquency (alpha = 0.90). Details concerning all of the measures employed
in this study can be found in Appendix AI.
Musical tastes
Our primary dependent measure is adolescent musical preferences. Musical
categories can be understood as both a marketing strategy devised by the
recording industry and record stores and a more or less accurate reflection of
consumer taste (Frith 1999). Neither fixed and immutable nor arbitrary and
meaningless, they provide a map of musical genres that are broadly recognized
by both the recording industry and those who listen to music.At the same time,
we are very aware that change is the essence of popular music and specific
musical styles only have a short shelf life. Thus while we can claim a nuanced
set of musical categories reflective of the styles available to listeners when the
research was conducted, we are mainly interested in underlying patterns –
patterns that exist regardless of the more ephemeral labels used to categorize
them. Indicators of musical taste in our study are derived from the question:
‘How much do you like each of the following types of music?’ Respondents
were then asked to evaluate each of eleven contemporary musical genres: soul,
rhythm and blues, jazz, hip/hop and rap, reggae and dance hall, classical and
opera, country and new country, pop and top 40, alternative (including punk,
grunge), heavy metal (hard rock), ethnic music (traditional/cultural), and
techno (dance).7 Musical tastes were assessed on a five-point Likert scale that
addresses whether respondents liked the musical genre ‘Very much’, ‘Quite a
lot’, ‘A little bit’, ‘Not very much’, and ‘Not at all’.
Unlike some previous research that has focused exclusively on the musical
genres most liked (Peterson and Kern 1996) or disliked (Bryson 1996, 1997)
by respondents, we calculate the degree of appreciation (or lack of appre-
ciation) each respondent has for each particular musical genre. Our rationale
is twofold: First, we are most interested in developing a typology of the
general patterning of musical tastes: if one type of music is liked (or dis-
liked), what other types of music are liked (or disliked)? – the ‘combinatorial
logic’ that Van Eijck refers to (2001). Second, dichotomizing musical tastes,
and concentrating on either the most favoured or least favoured genres,
results in lost information. It is important for us to understand the middle
ground – those adolescents who structure their tastes around a general
approval of a spectrum of musical genres rather than intense feelings for

specific genres.8
Analytic procedure
Data analysis occurs in two stages. First, an overview of the distribution of

adolescent musical tastes is provided. To accomplish this we develop a typol-
ogy of adolescent musical tastes patterns employing a two stage cluster analy-
sis (hierarchical agglomerative and k-means) procedure. Cluster analysis
groups respondents together based on their common responses to questions/
measures, and is useful at identifying distinct groups of relatively homogenous
entities, groups that are highly internally homogenous (members are similar to
one another) and highly externally heterogeneous (members are not like
members of other clusters) (Aldenderfer and Blashfield 1984). We anticipate
that this procedure will help us to identify the various musical taste clusters
experienced by young people, something Van Eijck (2001) has also referred to
as ‘metagenres’. For space considerations a detailed overview of the clustering
procedure has been omitted but is available upon request.
Following the creation of a typology of musical tastes, for the second stage
of our analysis we employ multivariate regression techniques (OLS, Logistic)
to identify cluster differences across a number of independent variables.
Conversely, our typology of musical tastes patterns is then employed as an
independent predictor of young people’s peer and hedonistic leisure, drug
use, and delinquency. All analyses were conducted with the Stata 8.0 com-
puter program using the survey commands that account for intra-cluster cor-
relation due to the sampling strategy.
Results
The patterning of adolescent musical tastes

What musical genres do Toronto high school youth like most and least?
Examination of Table I reveals how much, overall, our respondents evaluate
the various musical genres. It is quite apparent that rap (35.4 per cent report
liking it ‘very much’) is the form of music most popular with Toronto high
school students, followed by pop, and reggae and dance hall. Conversely,
several musical types receive very low levels of general appreciation, includ-
ing: classical (4.6 per cent), country (3.2 per cent), ethnic music (9 per cent),
and, more surprisingly, heavy metal (7.5 per cent). It would appear that,
overall, the ‘anything but heavy metal’ sentiment identified by Bryson (1996)
is not restricted to adults.
British Journal of Sociology 59(1)
Table I: Distribution of adolescent musical tastes
Variables How much do you like each of the following types of music?
N 1 2 3 4 5
Very much Quite a lot A little bit Not very much Not at all
Soul, Rhythm and Blues 3353 13.1% 10.9% 23.5% 22.1% 30.4%
Jazz 3348 4.5% 5.7% 22.7% 28.3% 38.8%
Hip/Hop and Rap 3356 35.4% 21.0% 20.7% 10.6% 12.3%
Reggae and Dance Hall 3362 22.6% 15.3% 23.6% 17.6% 20.7%
Classical and Opera 3364 4.6% 7.4% 17.3% 19.9% 50.8%
Country and New Country 3353 3.2% 4.8% 16.9% 21.8% 53.3%
Pop and Top 40 3364 23.4% 21.1% 23.2% 12.6% 19.7%
Alternative (Punk, Grunge) 3364 11.9% 10.7% 18.3% 17.9% 41.1%
Heavy Metal (Hard Rock) 3353 7.5% 5.9% 11.1% 17.1% 58.4%
Ethnic Music (traditional/cultural) 3353 9.0% 6.7% 11.5% 14.8% 57.9%
Techno (Dance) 3357 18.8% 18.4% 24.2% 14.2% 24.3%
Musical consumption and teenage lifestyles
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2008

129
However, what we are most interested in is the relationship between differ-

ent musical preferences and their audiences. Table II outlines the results of our
cluster analysis and provides means for music variables, as well as the F
statistics and Eta-squared (h2), for each music variable. Seven clusters of
varying sizes were derived from the eleven music variables. We are able to
describe and compare each cluster by examing the mean approval rating for
each specific music variable relative to the cluster specific mean, with scores
approaching 1 indicating strong approval of that genre of music, and scores
approaching 5 indicating a strong dislike.
The largest group (n = 616) is composed of those who report an above
average enjoyment of techno and dance, mainstream pop, and hip-hop and rap.
We refer to these adolescents as the Club Kids. Next is a similar-sized (n = 605)
group of adolescents who are enthusiastic listeners of soul, rhythm, and blues,
hip-hop, and reggae and dance hall, and are considerably less enthusiastic
about everything else. We refer to them as Black Stylists. Then there is a fairly
large (n = 482) grouping of youth who have an above average liking of classical
music and opera, jazz, soul, rhythm, and blues, country music and mainstream
pop. Because classical music and opera are constituents of this cluster, we refer
to this group as the New Traditionalists, although it is the Omnivores, to be
discussed in a moment, who are the most appreciative of those genres. The
fourth largest (n = 425) group comprises a sizeable number of heavy metal and
hard rock, alternative, punk and grunge fans – designated by us as Hard
Rockers. Then there is a surprisingly large (n = 384) group of adolescents who
are generally only marginally interested in any kind of music. Needless to say,
not much attention has been paid to Musical Abstainers, as we will call them,
in previous research, the usual assumption being that music is a uniformly high
priority for all adolescents (Frith 1978a). The group we call the Ethnic Cultur-
alists are so described because of a dominant preference for a quite wide range
of ethnic music, as well as a greater than average liking for soul and R&B, jazz,
classical music and opera, country music techno and dance, and mainstream
pop. The smallest group (n = 338), referred to here as the Musical Omnivores,
is composed of those who have an above average appreciation for all eleven
musical genres.
What does cluster analysis do to our understanding of teenage musical
tastes? On the face of it, the very fact that preferences do cluster together
and that most respondents like more than one genre suggests that their
tastes are more omnivorous than univorous. That said, it is also quite evident
that there are plenty of students whose tastes are fairly narrow: Black Styl-
ists, Hard Rockers and Club Kids combine an enthusiastic approval for a few
genres, and a relative disregard for the remainder. Moreover, while members
of these three groups are in broad agreement about their dislike of country
music and ethnic music, as well as classical music and opera, they also tend
to dislike each other’s core preferences. Thus, Hard Rockers dislike rap and
Table II: Cluster membership and cluster variable means for seven-cluster solution
Variables Clusters

Variable Club Kids Black Stylists New The Hard The Ethnic Musical Eta2 Groups
means (Cluster 1) (Cluster 2) Traditionalist Rockers Abstainers Culturalist Omnivores h2 F/c2
(Cluster 3) (Cluster 4) (Cluster 5) (Cluster 6) (Cluster 7) (6 df)
Soul, Rhythm and Blues 3.46 4.14 2.81 2.66 4.21 4.62 3.35 2.46 0.327 261.42c
Jazz 3.91 4.43 3.93 3.18 4.29 4.66 3.84 2.86 0.273 201.42c
Hip/Hop and Rap 2.44 1.84 1.30 3.08 3.60 3.43 2.51 1.95 0.365 301.42c
Reggae and Dance Hall 2.99 2.32 1.74 3.73 4.16 4.48 3.01 2.22 0.469 373.51c
Classical and Opera 4.05 4.57 4.61 3.01 4.26 4.45 3.87 2.95 0.287 475.36c
Country and New Country 4.17 4.39 4.61 3.82 4.60 4.36 3.84 3.23 0.174 216.64c
Pop and Top 40 2.84 2.31 4.04 2.00 3.26 3.76 2.31 1.84 0.342 113.17c
Alternative (Punk, 3.66 3.89 4.71 3.50 1.57 4.60 4.23 2.36 0.563 692.47c
Grunge)
Heavy Metal (Hard Rock) 4.13 4.52 4.87 4.51 2.10 4.67 4.58 3.00 0.559 679.66c
Ethnic 4.06 4.72 4.60 4.39 4.62 4.42 1.66 3.16 0.558 678.58c
(traditional/cultural)
Techno (Dance) 3.07 1.86 4.33 3.09 3.44 3.99 2.63 2.05 0.405 365.86c
N 3230 616 605 482 425 384 380 338
Notes:
Values approaching 1 indicate a great deal of appreciation for that genre of music, while values approaching 5 indicate a dislike.
a
p < 0.05. b p < 0.01. c p < 0.001 (two-tailed tests).

131
techno while the Black Stylists dislike grunge, punk, heavy metal, and
techno.
Understanding musical taste

The seven basic clusters thus outlined, we now proceed to an examination of
the correlates of cluster membership. Table III presents logistic regression
results of various correlates of cluster membership for each of the seven
musical taste clusters, where each column represents a separate logistic regres-
sion comparing that cluster to all remaining clusters. We begin with socio-
demographic variables of age, sex, racial background. We find that Club Kids
are younger, mainly white, with smaller numbers of black and Asian students.
Black Stylists are also younger, largely, though not exclusively, black, with
some South Asian representation. New Traditionalists are older, more likely
female than male (in fact, they are the musical cluster most dominated by
females), with a substantially high proportion of Asian students. Ethnic
Culturalists have a similar profile: older, but with a significantly larger Asian
and South Asian membership. The Hard Rockers are younger, predominately
male, and overwhelmingly white, with Black students conspicuously absent
from this group. Most studies of young people and music note that music
devotees tend to be male (Frith 1978b). However, our findings suggest the
opposite pattern as well: abstainers are predominantly male and largely white,
though not significantly so. Finally, there are the Musical Omnivores who are
older than other students and significantly Asian (though less so than the
Ethnic Culturalists). An initial analysis thus suggests that musical tastes are
largely differentiated by race and ethnicity and to a smaller degree by gender
and age. We now turn to the effects of parental social class and links with
students’ educational experiences.
We are unsure whether to question Bourdieu’s emphasis on social class as a
differentiator of musical taste, or to flag its waning influence. In any event, the
socioeconomic status characteristics of parents are not particularly salient
predictors of their children’s musical preferences.We are similarly uncertain as
to whether we should be surprised by this finding, since other recent research
on (adult) cultural consumption also reports a less than close fit between class
and taste (Erickson 1996; Chan and Goldthorpe 2007). That said, parental
effects are not entirely absent, since maternal education and employment
exert some influence on some tastes: Black Stylists are more likely than other
groups to have a mother who is employed, whereas Ethnic Culturalists do not.
Similarly, New Traditionalists report university-educated mothers, whereas
Abstainers and Ethnic Culturists have mothers significantly less likely to have
attended university. The remaining significant effect of home background is
that Black Stylists are less likely than others to come from two parent families
Table III: Logistic regression of musical taste clusters on socio-demographic, socioeconomic status, school, and cultural capital measures (odds ratios and standard
errors)
Variables Clusters
Club Kids Black Stylists New Traditionalist The Hard Rockers The Abstainers Ethnic Culturalist Musical Omnivores
(n = 616) (n = 605) (n = 482) (n = 425) (n = 384) (n = 380) (n = 338)
OR SE OR SE OR SE OR SE SE OR OR SE OR SE

Socio-demographic
Age 0.88a 0.03 0.88a 0.03 1.19b 0.03 0.86b 0.03 1.02 0.04 1.12a 0.04 1.13a 0.06
Female 1.36 0.18 0.87 0.13 1.50b 0.18 0.59b 0.07 0.61b 0.08 1.32 0.21 0.93 0.12
Black 0.20b 0.06 13.9b 3.00 0.58 0.12 0.04b 0.01 0.57 0.29 1.84 0.56 1.17 0.24
Asian 0.41b 0.06 0.76 0.24 1.51a 0.26 0.19b 0.05 1.13 0.30 5.23b 1.25 1.73a 0.34
South Asian 0.58b 0.09 2.41b 0.39 0.60 0.14 0.23b 0.04 1.36 0.19 6.51b 1.35 1.13 0.20
Other 0.72 0.11 2.00a 0.45 1.04 0.19 0.48b 0.11 0.90 0.22 3.51b 0.97 0.89 0.23
Socioeconomic status
Father received 0.92 0.11 0.96 0.14 0.92 0.10 0.98 0.14 1.24 0.20 0.98 0.19 1.16 0.15
postsecondary education
Mother received 0.82 0.11 1.37 0.21 1.74b 0.27 1.00 0.12 0.51b 0.09 0.68a 0.10 1.02 0.15
postsecondary education
b
Father is employed 1.46 0.19 0.84 0.09 0.85 0.12 1.12 0.14 0.68 0.11 1.20 0.23 1.11 0.18
Mother is employed 1.18 0.12 1.36a 0.15 0.98 0.10 0.91 0.09 0.79 0.09 0.77a 0.07 1.14 0.14
Two parent family 1.13 0.15 0.61b 0.07 1.26 0.19 0.76 0.11 1.29 0.23 1.43a 0.27 0.97 0.15
Subjective social class 1.06 0.06 1.06 0.10 0.97 0.08 0.83 0.06 0.99 0.10 1.13 0.11 0.91 0.08
School Measures
Ever suspended from 1.05 0.16 1.79b 0.28 0.51b 0.09 0.89 0.18 0.77 0.19 0.79 0.20 1.09 0.20
school
b b a b
Ever skipped school 1.53 0.19 1.94 0.25 0.74 0.09 1.00 0.20 0.54 0.08 0.86 0.13 1.00 0.19
“A” Student 0.62b 0.09 0.72 0.10 1.93b 0.24 0.96 0.16 1.02 0.13 1.08 0.15 0.98 0.14
Advanced stream 1.03 0.16 0.73 0.09 1.12 0.21 1.54a 0.26 0.92 0.16 1.01 0.19 1.01 0.22
Education is important 1.31 0.18 1.11 0.14 0.89 0.10 0.63b 0.09 1.01 0.14 1.45 0.21 0.96 0.15
part of life
Cultural capital 0.66b 0.04 0.63b 0.04 1.47b 0.08 1.17b 0.05 0.81a 0.06 1.08 0.07 1.55b 0.09
Nagelkerke R2 0.10 0.24 0.12 0.12 0.07 0.12 0.05
Note:

133
a
p < .01 b p < .001.
(which probably explains why they have working mothers), whereas Ethnic
Culturalists are most likely to have grown up with both parents present.
Students’ own educational achievements appear to exert a stronger influ-
ence on their musical preferences. Table III demonstrates that this is particu-
larly the case with those students least likely to be regarded by the school as
good ones. Black Stylists report school suspension, frequent absence from
school, and a paucity of ‘A’ grades, more so than other musical clusters. The
Club Kids share some, though not all, of this profile. They skip school and are
unlikely to be ‘A’ students, but are not significantly subject to suspension.
The Black Stylists and Club Kids also report significantly more modest
educational goals than other students. Overall, our respondents had high
educational expectations. In planning for future undergraduate and graduate
degrees and professional qualifications, they provide evidence of the revolu-
tion in Canadians’ educational expectations that Davies and Guppy (2006)
speak of. Within this context, the Black Stylists and Club Kids are relatively
unambitious, planning for no more than an undergraduate education. Like-
wise, they were the only two groups for whom musical taste and educational
plans correlated significantly.
At the other end of the school hierarchy are the New Traditionalists. These
are the high performing students for whom ‘A’ grades are routine, who are
never suspended, and who rarely miss classes. Less easily classifiable are the
Hard Rockers. They are advanced stream students who do not report particu-
larly good grades nor are likely to feel that education is an important part of
their lives. However, their relative disaffection from education does not trans-
late into the oppositional practices of skipping and suspension. School vari-
ables have a more scattered effect upon the remaining taste cultures. Neither
school achievement, or advanced stream status, nor skipping and suspension
predict Ethnic Culturalism, while good attendance is the only hallmark of the
Abstainer group. For their part, the Omnivores are largely devoid of distin-
guishing educational characteristics.
Although it appears that musical preferences are more related to the edu-
cational domain than the familial one, it may also be that our analysis has
understated the contribution that parents make to their children’s tastes: since
we do not partition the indirect effects of parental background on respon-
dents’ educational achievements, it is possible that some of the school effects
are themselves a consequence of family background.
Partial support for this proposition is found when we examine links
between cultural capital, our final independent variable, and musical taste.
We find that students in possession of cultural capital are significantly more
likely to be Musical Omnivores, New Traditionalists, and Hard Rockers;
those bereft of cultural capital are likely to be Club Kids and Black Stylists,
while being an Ethnic Culturalist or Musical Abstainer is unconnected to
cultural capital.
Cultural capital, as conceptualized by Bourdieu and others, is a cumulative

product of parental inheritance and students’ own practices.While not primarily
interested in its correlates, we can note that parental education, particularly
maternal education, is a strong predictor of student cultural capital (details
available upon request). This suggests to us that at least some of our respon-
dents’ cultural capital resources had been acquired from parents, and that
therefore some of the relationship between cultural capital and musical taste
can be understood as an indirect parental legacy. At the same time, the link
between students’ cultural capital and their musical tastes are net of their status
origins – suggesting relatively autonomous effects of cultural capital as well.
Musical taste and peer group activity

Our analysis so far has established the presence of music in young peoples’
lives but neither its importance nor connections to broader youth cultural
activity (Frith 1978a: 39). It is entirely possible that the preferences that they
have reported on only passively reflect their social origins and educational
experiences, or are of only passing interest to them. One way of demonstrating
otherwise – of showing that musical tastes are a significant feature of young
people’s lifestyles – is to document their association with peer group activities
that, net of other factors, may have long-term consequences, for good or ill,
upon life course transitions.9 In conducting this exercise, we emphasize that
any links found between cultural preferences and cultural practices should be
interpreted as denoting an affinity(or correspondence) between the two, not a
relationship of cause and effect. Our cross-sectional data cannot determine
whether musical taste is reflective of peer-group behaviour or, instead, an
active agent in its composition.
Table IV highlights multiple regression results examining the relationship
between musical tastes and four measures of adolescent behaviour – peer
leisure, hedonistic leisure, drug use, and delinquency. As with the musical taste
themselves, it is worth noting that school factors are seemingly more important
and more consistent influences upon peer commitments than the SES charac-
teristics of parents (details available upon request). In terms of the role of
music, and using musical abstainers as the referent category, we find that
specific musical preferences correlate strongly with three of the four indicies
of peer activity. Peer leisure is highest among Club Kids and Black Stylists,
followed by Hard Rockers and Musical Omnivores. At the other extreme,
neither New Traditionalists nor Ethnic Culturalists demonstrate significant
involvement in any form of peer leisure.
Hedonistic leisure, drug use, and delinquency represent more risky and
disreputable forms of leisure use. Club Kids and Black Stylists are significantly
involved in hedonistic leisure, a pattern not found with other music clusters. In
terms of drug use, Hard Rockers and Black Stylists are the groups most deeply
Table IV: Regression of peer leisure, hedonistic leisure, and drug use on socio-demographic, socioeconomic, and school measures, cultural capital, and musical tastes
136
(betas and standard errors)
Variables Peer leisure Hedonistic leisure Drug use Delinquency
Beta SE Beta SE Beta SE Beta SE
Socio-demographic
Age -0.02 0.01 0.10b 0.01 0.14b 0.03 -0.20b 0.04
Female -0.12b 0.04 -0.18b 0.04 -0.26 0.11 -1.36b 0.18
Black -0.58b 0.06 -0.29b 0.07 -1.35b 0.25 -0.21 0.40
Asian -0.30b 0.05 -0.50b 0.06 -1.05b 0.15 -0.38 0.16
South Asian -0.32b 0.07 -0.48b 0.06 -1.27 0.14 -0.50 0.22
Other -0.25b 0.04 -0.12 0.06 -0.50 0.22 0.31 0.27
Socioeconomic status
Father received postsecondary education 0.01 0.03 0.01 0.04 0.18 0.17 0.02 0.26
Mother received postsecondary education 0.01 0.04 0.06 0.04 0.47a 0.14 0.63 0.24

Father is employed 0.00 0.04 0.02 0.03 0.16 0.13 0.18 0.20
Mother is employed 0.15b 0.03 0.16b 0.05 0.51b 0.11 0.26 0.15
Two parent family 0.06 0.05 -0.06 0.05 -0.33 0.18 -0.35 0.21
Subjective Social Class 0.07b 0.02 0.05 0.00 -0.13 0.07 -0.35a 0.12
School Measures
Ever suspended from school 0.32b 0.07 0.55b 0.06 1.70b 0.25 3.28b 0.384
Ever skipped school 0.47b 0.04 0.41b 0.04 1.08b 0.14 1.65b 0.17
Julian Tanner, Mark Asbridge and Scot Wortley
“A” Student -0.09 0.03 -0.14b 0.03 -0.39b 0.08 -0.28 0.17
Advanced stream -0.13b 0.04 -0.12 0.03 -0.43 0.17 -0.72 0.29
Education is important part of life -0.19b 0.03 -0.15b 0.04 -0.93b 0.19 -1.25b 0.26
Cultural capital 0.12b 0.01 0.03 0.02 -0.20a 0.06 -0.23a 0.08
Musical taste clusters (abstainers ref)
Club Kids 0.50b 0.06 0.32b 0.05 0.27 0.19 0.36 0.27
Black Stylists 0.58b 0.08 0.43b 0.06 0.63a 0.22 1.49b 0.41
New Traditionalists 0.08 0.06 -0.09 0.05 0.07 0.19 -0.08 0.34
Hard Rockers 0.28b 0.07 0.02 0.07 0.68b 0.20 0.02 0.35
Ethnic Culturalist 0.18 0.07 0.13 0.07 0.19 0.19 0.19 0.27
Musical Omnivores 0.31b 0.07 0.17 0.06 0.62 0.24 0.54 0.30
Nagelkerke R2 0.21 0.30 0.25 0.23
a

Note: p < 0.01 b p < 0.001.
involved. Finally, our measure of delinquency, encompassing involvement in a

number of minor property offences, was unrelated to musical taste cultures
with one exception – Black Stylists. Net of other factors, racial background in
particular, Black Stylists demonstrated a greater involvement in delinquency
relative to adolescents in other musical taste clusters.
Overall, our findings confirm that musical preferences give focus and defi-
nition to certain peer group activities. Black Stylists and Club Kids are heavily
involved in peer leisure and hedonistic leisure, whereas New Traditionalists
and Ethnic Culturalists are comparatively uninvolved. Some of this activity has
the potential to influence the course of school to work transitions. A criminal
conviction for illicit activities or drug use, for instance, is likely to lead to
lowered educational and occupational attainments. In this regard, it is inter-
esting to note the willingness of the Hard Rockers, a group reasonably well
stocked with academic and cultural capital, to jeopardize their – and their
parents’ – investment through their pursuit of risky leisure practices.
Discussion
This paper has offered a a quantitative reading of audiences for music among
young people, a reading set against an increasingly diverse musical landscape
and informed by theoretical ideas drawn from cultural sociology. Our findings
suggest that the musical preferences of Toronto high school students are both
varied and structured, though not necessarily in ways envisaged by our theo-
retical sources, and are linked to forms of, and degrees of, involvement in peer
group activity.
Bourdieu is primarily concerned with the impact of social class on cultural
consumption. Among our adolescents, however, their own educational expe-
riences and cultural capital are more important immediate influences on
musical taste. The weak direct effects of parental social class and stronger
independent effects of schooling and cultural capital suggest that current
musical preferences more likely foreshadow their future status destinations
than reflect their status origins, and that the school is therefore not just a site
of class reproduction, as Bourdieu supposes. Moreover, while race and
ethnicity play little part in Bourdieu’s analysis of cultural stratification , those
factors emerge as important dererminants of taste in our own.
The most academically successful students in our sample – the young people
most likely to assume high status positions as adults – are the New
Traditionalists. They are certainly an academic elite and have some liking for
classical music and opera. However, their musical tastes cannot be construed
as elitist or highbrow – at least not according to our understanding of those
terms. Not only do they like popular music, but like some types of it more than
they like the classical forms. There is little evidence, therefore, of any aesthetic
distancing, or rejection, of the popular music tradition.
The Ethnic Culturalist have a similar profile: more modest levels of

academic achievement, but shared educational ambitions, some interest in
classical music that is overshadowed by a stronger preference for ethnic
music and the pop mainstream; again, there is no monolithic repudiation
of popular music. These two groups are also relatively uninvolved in all
forms of peer group activity, especially its most deviant and disreputable
versions.
Richard Peterson’s contribution to post-Bourdieu cultural analysis is his
identification of high status omnivores, who declare their cultural superiority
by the breadth, rather than the narrowness, of their musical interests. His
omnivores favour classical music, but also enjoy some, but not all, popular
music genres. The Omnivores in our study do not fit this description: they like
all musical genres – pop and classical alike – with the solitary exception (and
only just) of country music. Furthermore, the classical canon is neither a
dominant taste nor, counter to Bethany Bryson’s earlier findings, is rap a genre
rejected by the otherwise culturally tolerant (Bryson 1996). Quite the contrary,
in fact. Our Musical Omnivores, like the members of several other taste
cultures, have a significant interest in rap music.
No less importantly, our omnivores are not part of an academic elite.
Although well resourced with cultural capital, they are neither particularly
good students, nor especially ambitious ones. Their extensive leisure interests,
and rates of peer participation (though, tellingly, nothing seriously illegal)
mark them out as Bohemians, not scholars, for whom high status futures are
not guaranteed, nor, more importantly, necessarily desired.
Peterson contrasts omnivores with low status, poorly educated, univores.
The least successful students in our sample are the Black Stylists. They are also
the group most extensively involved in peer group activity, especially its most
deviant forms. As such, they qualify as the most oppositional of our groups.
The Club Kids are similar, but less deviant. Our data also suggest that, in its
univorous form, as the central element in the Black Stylists taste culture, rap
has replaced heavy metal as the music of choice for low attainment students,
regardless of class, racial or ethnic background. Furthermore, while black
youth do express a stronger preference for rap, reggae, soul and R&B than
students from other racial and ethnic backgrounds, the close relationship
between the music and subcultural delinquency is equally evident among
White and Asian rap fans. Clearly, more research is needed on rap culture and
its varied meanings.
Heavy metal is now part of a fairly univorous, male dominated hard rock
taste culture. It is not, however, a particularly low status one. Hard Rockers are
competent students, though relatively unenthusiastic ones. They are not short
of cultural capital, they are in university bound programmes, and neither their
disdain for school nor their participation in peer group activity translates into
serious scholastic underachievement. Hard Rockers are also one of only three
groups – the New Traditionalists and Abstainers (who have little interest in any
kind of music) are the other two – to report disliking rap. They also, unlike the
New Traditionalists, have a low regard for jazz, soul, rhythm and blues, reggae
and dance hall – all musical genres most readily associated with black listeners.
Since the Black Stylists are even more rejecting of heavy metal and punk and
grunge, it would appear that they and the Hard Rockers are involved in a
relationship of mutual disregard and that their respective musical tastes serve
as a symbolic boundary between adolescent groups separated and divided by
race, cultural capital, and school achievement.
In this paper, we have classified and categorized young peoples’ musical
tastes, and made inferences about cultural hierarchies based on respondents’
status characteristics and their degree of cultural capital. However, Sarah
Thornton (1995) has observed that popular music audiences create their own
hierarchies according to their own rules and aesthetics. A limitation of the
present research is that we have little first hand information about how young
people acquire knowledge about, and evaluate, different musical genres – in
a word, how they use subcultural capital. Questions of this sort are probably
better addressed with more qualitative research designs; and indeed more
recent studies of young people, music, and youth culture have employed quali-
tative methods (Bennett 2000; Muggleton 2000). However, these ethnographic
exercises tend to focus on self-identified fans of specific musical styles, the
cognoscenti who may not be representative of all young listeners; such samples
are invariably small and rule out larger questions about the evolving nature of
musica1 taste. We believe that these ‘big picture’ questions are, in fact, best
interrogated with information collected from large numbers of young people
in dedicated surveys of the sort that we have just described.
We have used our survey to direct the ‘cultural turn’ in sociology towards
young people’s musical tastes. Are cultural preferences and cultural practices
forged in adolescence significant for future adult status attainments, as some
studies (i.e. Hagan 1991; Bielby 2004) suggest? Or are the leisure and cultural
preoccupations of youth of only fitful or fleeting consequence for young adult
identities and occuptional careers, as other investigations (i.e. Bynner and
Ashford 1992; Roberts 1997) have found? Answers to this question awaits
future research.
(Date accepted: December 2007)
Appendix AI: Descriptive statistics for all measures

Variables Coding Cases Mean/
Per cent
Independent measures:
Age Years 3331 16.62
Gender Male 1696 49.9
Female 1700 50.1
Race White 1334 39.4
Black 480 14.2
Asian 391 11.5
South Asian 653 19.3
Other 531 15.7
Father received postsecondary education Yes 1073 31.5
No 2327 68.4
Mother received postsecondary education Yes 917 27.0
No 2483 73.0
Father employed full time Yes 2608 76.5
No 792 32.5
Mother employed full time Yes 2057 61.1
No 1308 39.9
Two parent family Yes 2609 76.7
No 791 23.3
Have been suspended from school at least once Yes 450 13.2
No 2950 86.8
Have skipped school at least once Yes 2493 73.3
No 907 26.7
Primarily receive “A” Grades Yes 1092 32.1
No 2308 67.9
Educational Stream Advanced 2642 78.0
General 736 22.0
Education is Important Part of Life Yes 2309 71.8
No 905 28.2
Cultural capital leisure (index of frequency of involvement in Z-score 3325
playing a musical instrument, attending cultural events, going to
the library, going to the symphony or opera, going to the
museum, reading a book for pleasure, and involvement with
hobbies, with an " = 0.65).
Dependent measures:
Future educational plans High school 401 11.8
or less
College/ 1782 52.5
Undergrad
Graduate/ 1206 35.5
Profession
Peer leisure (index of frequency of involvement in driving around Z-score 3289
in car with friends, visiting friends at their home, shopping with
friends, hanging out in malls with friends, hanging on the street,
visiting with friends at your home, hanging out in coffee shops,
with an " = 0.72).
Hedonistic leisure (index of frequency of kissing and fooling Z-score 3321
around, having sex, going to house parties or raves, going to
bars or nightclubs, with an " = 0.79).
Drug Use (index of frequency of use of tobacco, alcohol, Z-score 3336
marijuana, cocaine and crack, and other drugs, with an " = 0.74).
Delinquent involvement (index of frequency of involvement in Z-Score 3396
stealing food, drink, or candy, using public transportation
without paying, spraying graffiti, using fake ID, breaking into
cars, minor theft under $50, property damage, stealing bikes,
with an " = 0.90).
Notes
1. This research was supported by a grant mothers and fathers employment situation
from the Social Sciences and Humanities (eg. the nature of their work, earnings, posi-
Research Council (SSHRC). We would also tion in work organizations, occupational
like to thank Scott Davies for his comments prestige) by adolescents (or children).
on a previous draft of this paper. 7. Cognisant of the dangers of imposing
2. Bernice Martin has similarly noted a classificatory schema of our own making
the growing alignment of progressive rock upon high school students (albeit with their
with high art traditions in the UK in the late input from focus groups sessions conducted
1960s (Martin 1981). prior to the main survey), we also included
3. For further explorations of this issue an open-ended question that invited them
with adult populations, see Katz-Gerro to identify additional musical favourites. In
(1999) and Van Eijck (2001). total 515 respondents filled in the open-
4. More direct evidence of the ascension ended question. The majority simply regur-
of rap music can be gleaned from the Bill- gitated musical genres presented in the
board chart for the 12 of October 2003, questionnaire, particularly different forms of
where for the first time in American chart ethnic music (Indian, Spanish, Arabic), and
history, all acts in that the top 10 were were variations of club music (trip hop, trance,
rap/hip-hop artists. jungle, drum and beat). Two notable excep-
5. Far from being the overwhelming tions were Christian music and Latin/salsa
musical choice of the teenagers in Cole- music.
man’s sample, Elvis Presley, the most impor- 8. There is a tendency in the sociological
tant symbol of generational differences in literature review to depict young people’s
American society at that time, was consider- behaviours and cultural preferences in
ably less popular than Pat Boone. Subse- polarised terms – as deviant or conformist,
quent analysis revealed that Presley was subcultural or mainstream (Thornton 1995).
primarily the choice of working-class stu- It is this sort of dichotomizing that we seek
dents (Murdock and McCron 1976: 15–16, to avoid.
citing Johnstone 1961). 9. A more direct method of gauging
6. We also collected information on the significance of music is to ask about its
parental occupational status. However, it is importance in people’s lives. We posed
very difficult to get accurate information just such a question. The results suggest that
from students about their parents’ jobs, music was most salient for Black Stylists,
and the answers we received were invariably Hard Rockers and Omnivores: 52% of each
vague. For example, one respondent claimed group said that music was ‘quite’ or ‘very’
that his dad ‘worked for IBM’. Obviously, important to them. Music was less important
we could not determine whether his father for the Club Kids (40%), Ethnic Culturalists
was an executive, a computer scientist, or a (39%), New Traditionalists (36%) and –
member of the janitorial staff. Our experi- not surprisingly – the Abstainers (37%).
ences in this regard cause us to question the Clearly,music is more likely to be a cultural
reliability and validity of measures of paren- focus, albeit in different ways, of the Black
tal class or status characteristics that rely on Stylists, Hard Rockers and Omnivores than
the provision, in surveys, of details about of the remaining groups.
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The British Journal of Sociology 2008 Volume 59 Issue 1

Our favourite melodies: musical consumption and

Julian Tanner, Mark Asbridge and Scot Wortley

Introduction: cultural sociology and the study of popular music

widely understood to be the late Pierre Bourdieu, who depicts culture as a

British research on the social bases of adolescent musical taste cultures

Recasting Bourdieu: omnivores and univores in North America

musical tastes have become more eclectic and individualized, no longer an

The present study

We argue that high status origins, academic achievement, educational ambi-

and Wortley 2002). Self-administered questionnaires were completed by 3,393

students to anticipate whether they would finish high school, or move on to

Peer group activity (fun and excitement, deviance and crime)

approval of a spectrum of musical genres rather than intense feelings for

Data analysis occurs in two stages. First, an overview of the distribution of

The patterning of adolescent musical tastes

© London School of Economics and Political Science 2008

However, what we are most interested in is the relationship between differ-

British Journal of Sociology 59(1)

© London School of Economics and Political Science 2008

Understanding musical taste

British Journal of Sociology 59(1)

Nagelkerke R2 0.10 0.24 0.12 0.12 0.07 0.12 0.05

© London School of Economics and Political Science 2008

Cultural capital, as conceptualized by Bourdieu and others, is a cumulative

Musical taste and peer group activity

(betas and standard errors)

Variables Peer leisure Hedonistic leisure Drug use Delinquency

Beta SE Beta SE Beta SE Beta SE

© London School of Economics and Political Science 2008

British Journal of Sociology 59(1)

involved. Finally, our measure of delinquency, encompassing involvement in a

The Ethnic Culturalist have a similar profile: more modest levels of

Appendix AI: Descriptive statistics for all measures

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