How music and personality are linked?

[Avichal]

I was reading this article - http://psychology.about.com/od/personalitydevelopment/a/music-and-personality.htm which links type of music with different personalities and I was very surprised at its correctness.

I'm very introverted and the article was correct pointing out that I generally like indie music and seek less popular bands. I wonder how music and personality can be linked? Maybe it's not generally true but I guess it is in most cases.

I know there isn't a definite answer for this question yet but still I wanted to ask this and perhaps get some thoughts or insights from you guys.

 

[Evo]

My daughter is extremely outgoing, very popular and loves indie music. I also love Indie and underground music, I hate pop music. We're also workaholics, neither of us are creative. These types of "personality" things are as accurate as horoscopes, IMO. They're right some of the time, just based on the odds.

 

[Superposed_Cat]

I agree with evo, that's like saying only black people like rap or only psychopaths and smart people like classical music. I don't think sabermetrics can be applied in that way.

 

[Vurg]

My impression is that you can usually summarise a song by giving a list of less than 5 emotions and positioning them in a particular order to represent what emotions and personalities that the song is trying to appeal to. I am trying to refine this skill but I don't have a lot of spare time to invest into it but I do have a musician who is sending me her material for review in this way as she finds my input useful.

 

[Pythagorean]

I also agree with Evo. All "music genome" projects to date have failed miserably. Pandora is probably the most well-known (having coined and copyrighted the phrase themselves). It's also hard to tell with Pandora since they shove their crappy marketed songs down your channel.

I kept getting Ellie Goulding on my dubstep channel, right next to the visual advertisement of her album. Ugh.

 

[Monstrous Math]

I think it's not unreasonable to say that, since everyone has different tastes in music, there must be some differentiable variables within you that are correlated with your taste in music.

The problem is that people try to make vast oversimplifications like listening to Metallica means you take drugs or love to rebel, because stuff like this appeals to people. Your taste in music is far more likely to be influenced by the multitudes of interactions that have affected you in your life.

It's like why some people get so obsessed over horoscopes, as Evo said. Or people who get obsessed over their Myers-Briggs type (which would indicate that there are only 16 people in the world and we keep meeting them over and over again). It seems like an easy way to make sense of the world.

You probably could predict someone's taste in music in my opinion, but you would need a ton of information on that person, and a far deeper understanding of the mechanics of our brain than we currently have.