Musical empiricism
The ghost pianist who selected my Spotify Wrapped
The ghost pianist - Georges Roux - 1885
It’s December, which means that its time for the Spotify 2023 Wrapped. I find the Wrapped interesting for two major reasons:
It’s a fun empirical insight into myself
It’s a fun empirical insight into other people
Fun because I mean this investigation in a lighthearted sense. Empirical because there is no denying that our Spotify Wrapped is the music that we all actually listened to. Insight because I believe that music shows us a glimpse of what is really inside us, not what we might pretend on the outside. Here’s what I mean by this:
In modernity, many of our views are shaped by rationalizations and narratives that are beyond us. We imbibe culture without really understanding it. Our political and moral tastes are influenced by what others think rather than a deep empirical knowing via naïve access to the self.
Music, by contrast, has an ability to bypass the explicit, rational façade of modern existence and strike right at the core of what is inside of us. It evades the filter of heuristics. If you’re listening in the car by yourself and you don’t like a song, you just skip it. By contrast, when you hear a song you like, you listen literally hundreds of times.1
Below is a 4-frame montage of my 2023 wrapped. And I know what you’re thinking… Blink-182? What is this, 2001? I have an explanation, don’t worry. This is why I wanted to write this piece in the first place.
The three main forces behind my Spotify Wrapped
Music is psychologically special in many ways. It is personal. It resonates deeply. It grips us in a way other activities do not. It moves and transforms our emotions. And it connects us to other humans.
As I stated above, I cannot deny that these songs and artists really do capture my music in 2023. But do I “like” these songs? …Eh. I already made fun of myself for “liking” Blink-182, so you could say that I don’t even like that I “like” it. Instead, what I think Spotify Wrapped is telling us is that our empirical musical preferences resonate with us in some way. Perhaps in multiple ways. From the lens of psychology, I see 3 big drivers behind this:
Collective psychology
Personal psychology
Life circumstances
These three forces are subtle, disparate, and sometimes in tension with each other.
1) The collective
The collective side of our psyche is the instincts, archetypes, and symbols that live in our psyches. They are sentiments held by all of society.
You may notice that Taylor Swift is #3 on my top artists of 2023. Now, I personally think Taylor is an exceptionally talented musician. And I quite like her music. But it also goes without saying that her presence is bigger than her at this point. She’s a cultural phenomenon. She is at the core of the zeitgeist, a key pillar of the American Millennial generation. She is “America’s sweetheart.” All the girls want to be her and all the guys want to be with her. Through her work, she has tapped into the core of the collective unconscious and no doubt played a role in shaping it.
This is the point of the collective. It binds us into a group mind. The egregore sweeps us into a synchronized average. Social media accelerates this process and stretches it across the world. Musically, this collective side of psychology is how we identify and elevate our most popular musical artists.
For this reason, while it’s interesting that Taylor is on my list, and it is no doubt revealing about me, it’s probably less revealing about me personally than than it is about society as a whole. Her music is far beyond me. It is intertwined with what it is to be American today.
2) The personal
Personal psychology lies opposite of the collective. It is the psychology of the individual. It is all the neuroses, fears, unconscious desires, personal proclivities, and deep-seated dispositions that form the collage of the persona.
At my core, I’m an emotionally resonant person. I don’t say that with any kind of moral valence—and truly, it has advantages and disadvantages. It just means that I make decisions on feelings, not on thinking. I assess situations, people, and life decisions based on my emotions about them. And what’s interesting about this way of being is that my daily life is a continual layering of competing emotions as I assess the world.
On one end of the spectrum are the dispositional pylons that are lodged deep in my soul. They are stable over time and central to who I am, like a foundation that holds me in place, anchoring me to the seafloor across long stretches of my life. They are biological as well as experiential—my natural proclivities as well as the dispositions I learned from my parents and childhood community. This includes my openness to ideas, conscientiousness, low neuroticism, grounding, a desire for excellence, and optimism about life itself, each of which in turn influence my emotions.
On the other end of the spectrum are the fleeting emotions—those that guide my decisions in a more ephemeral way. These are emotions associated with fun, play, humor, and balance. They are dictated by my curiosity, playfulness, and extraversion.
“Music is the language of the invisible.” - Jon Batiste
Put all these emotions together and you get a layering of feelings. And my musical proclivities come out thus. They are thymotic, rooted in the physical body. They are layered, with many emotions stacking on top of each other. They favor sounds that build and recede; songs that are bright in sound and paced in tempo. Looking at my 2023 Wrapped, this is where you get songs like Carpet, Alive, and especially Dark Spin.
Dark Spin is probably the best example on my list that captures the layering of emotions that I’ve been describing. It’s also clearly outside of the collective. The music video only has around 20,000 views. It really belongs to me.2
3) The particular: life circumstances
The final factor, and perhaps most important to my Wrapped 2023 is life circumstances. For me, this year, it was the ending of a serious romantic relationship. The ultimate end was a difficult decision. And like all my decisions, I made it based on feelings, not a list of reasons.
And when the attendant emotions came up, they brought with them that same thymotic angst that I had not known since high school. It was an upwelling of rebellious detachment, youthful exuberance, and sadness about the pains of life.
And that’s why Blink-182 was ranked #2 on artists and #1 on songs. I had not listened to them in 15 years. Same with Newfound Glory—a contemporary of Blink-182—mid 2000s punk rock. The ghost pianist came out of hibernation with a thymotic bazooka aimed at my heart.
Life circumstances could include marriages, deaths, life changes, job changes, or anything else that grabs our emotions. Often these moments come without warning, shake us to our core, and change the course of our lives. They are events that alter the tuning forks inside us, reorder emotions, or re-engage those that were once lost.
For me, life circumstances might be one of the most powerful drivers of musical preference. The year my dad died was also the year I moved away from Colorado. My top artists that year were Gregory Alan Isakov, Maggie Rogers, Third Eye Blind, and Ludovico Einaudi, a much different lineup than 2023 and an honest reflection of what I felt that year.
Where you live, what you experience, and simply getting older all seem to affect preferences as well. Living in Colorado definitely did something to me. This shows in my #3 song Sweet Ever After by Ellie Holcomb, which is a type of song that I would not have listened to before living out there. Now I have a whole Colorado playlist of songs like this.3
We are some kind of blend of the 3 forces
It seems to me that if you put these three forces together, you get a unique Spotify Wrapped fingerprint. But of course, I wrote this piece mainly to investigate my own musical outcomes of 2023, so you could say I have a personal motivation here to explain why Blink-182 was all over my list.4
The question then arises: has anyone actually studied this question in a rigorous way?
What the literature says about psychology and music preferences
Turns out, someone in 2020 used Spotify data to test the relationship between personality type and musical preference. Here is a direct quote of the abstract:
Here we overcome limitations of prior research by leveraging ecologically valid streaming data: 17.6 million songs and over 662,000 hr of music listened to by 5,808 Spotify users spanning a 3-month period. Building on interactionist theories, we investigated the link between personality traits and music listening behavior, described by an extensive set of 211 mood, genre, demographic, and behavioral metrics. Findings from machine learning showed that the Big Five personality traits are predicted by musical preferences and habitual listening behaviors with moderate to high accuracy.
The big-5 personality traits, if you don’t know, is a set of traits used to study personality. You can remember them by the OCEAN acronym: Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Each of the five are typically evaluated on a normal distribution. So, your result is a function of where you fall in relation to a population.
What this Spotify study found, in short, is that there are links between these big-5 personality traits and musical preferences. This backs up a field of work that has made similar findings. Let’s to through these in order as they relate to musical preference:
Openness to experience is linked with more complex and novel music.
Conscientiousness is negatively correlated with intense and rebellious music, such as rock and heavy metal music.
Extraversion apparently leads to a preference for happy, upbeat, energetic, and rhythmic music. This includes rap, hip hop, soul, electronic, and dance music. Extraverts also apparently prefer listening to music in the background.
Agreeableness correlates with more easy-going and relaxed music.
Neuroticism is correlated with intense and rebellious music but also with classical music. People high in neuroticism also are more likely to use music to regulate their emotions.
This all sounds like a promising and interesting series of links between personality and musical preference.
Dissent in the science
But, not so fast. There is also evidence that the relationship between psychology and musical preference is far from settled. Here is a quote from the abstract of a 2017 meta-analysis that claims to find no relationship between psychology and musical preference:
All weighted averaged correlation coefficients were very small, with most of them near zero. Only 6 of the 30 coefficients exceeded 0.1 in magnitude (| r | ≥ 0.1). The largest effects were observed for the openness to experience personality trait, which exhibited small correlations with preference for three musical styles. Thus, personality traits barely account for interindividual differences in music preferences. Musical functions are discussed as an alternative explanation for these differences. The predictability of musical style preferences based on individual psychological variables is questioned in general.
If this is true, then maybe there is no relationship at all between psychology and musical preference.
Then again, it may be the case that all of these studies are flawed in that they are relying on “overly-homogenized musical genres” rather than the details of the individual songs themselves to assess the link between personality and musical preference. Basically, the issue may be that researchers are grouping all “country” songs as one genre and finding that, when they study people’s preference for country music that there is no correlation with personality type.
This is like having a hypothesis that a proclivity for Taylor Swift should lead to a preference also for Johnny Cash or Tim McGraw. That’s crazy. Isn’t that obviously not true?
Here’s another way in which this seems obviously not true. Louisiana is a top state for country music. Did these researchers really think that the average personality type in Louisiana would be different than in, say, Michigan (where the most popular music is classic rock)? Wouldn’t they have expected to still find variability in Louisianian’s personality despite low variability in musical taste? And similarly, it does seem reasonable to expect that there would need to be at least some musical variation in a genre for that genre to be successful at all.
In fact, it might even be necessary for there to be musical variation within an artist for that artist to be successful across a range of personality types. Taylor has everything from Teardrops on My Guitar to I Did Something Bad. We’ve all heard people complain about how so-and-so’s first album was amazing but everything after that sucked. If a study cannot take into account musical variation (or psychological preference) within a genre let alone variation within an artist then it might not be powerful enough to assess what’s really going on.
I’m no expert,5 but given all the uncertainty in these studies and all the data that Spotify is now sitting on, this seems worthy of further study.
Music should be seen as revealing
Studies aside, as I said in the beginning, this post is really just meant to be a fun insight into musical preference, and so I want to offer one final word of caution.
It’s easy to evaluate someone else’s music on a superficial level. I can judge my own 2023 musical track record pretty harshly, and when I see other people’s top artists, it’s similarly easy to want to put them into a box.
But, like those who use personality assessments to put people in boxes, that would be a mischaracterization and a mistake. The point isn’t to say what kind of person I am because of what artists are on my list, but to reveal something about me, my place in society, and the particulars of the year that I had. The point is to unveil the ghost pianist, her dispositions, and why she had such a propensity for playing Anthem Part Two this year.
It’s also worth noting that those of us who play instruments may just go play that song rather than listen to it on Spotify, and that this could influence our Wrapped results. For example, I play piano—classical music and chill songs that I can sing to. When the ghost pianist hits my inner ear, rather than listening to music on Spotify, I typically just go play it.
Third Eye Blind did not make my 2023 list, but I still refer to them as my favorite band. Their music captures me in my most true state, thymotic and layered, bright and yet reflective, playful, rising and falling, full of energy but with a harmonious dénouement. Maybe they will be back on my list next year.
If more of these songs make my list in 2024… it might mean I’m moving back.
It’s worth considering what music didn’t make our lists as well.
For example, in high school, I had a lot of exposure to Dave Matthews Band. DMB is like cocaine to many Virginians. They love his music. They love him. They love that he is from Virginia. You’d hear his music on the radio, in friends cars, in teachers classrooms. I never once enjoyed listening to it and still don’t. I’m not trying to critique DMB. I don’t dislike of his music in any targeted way. I just don’t prefer it. It feels arbitrary and wandering and unfocused; perhaps a little lazy and sedated. It still feels emotionally thin to me, in contrast to the layering I prefer.
I can’t stand grunge either. Nirvana, stone temple pilots, Pearl Jam, Sound garden. I’ve never finished a song without having to resist the urge to switch. To me it’s nihilistic an whiny. It feels too pessimistic to me, in contrast to the optimism I prefer.
I could go on. The point isn’t that these artists are bad—just that the emotions they contain do not resonate with me. They never did and they still don’t.
As usual, please see my about page for all the disclaimers about how I have no formal training in anything