You Are Your Music
You are your music. More accurately, your music is you. This is cool research from Spotify finding that your personality predicts your music choices. Personality comes first, it’s mostly (not entirely) a born-with kind of thing.
We all behave in ways that are trying to match our goals and values and orientation on the world.
- I identify as a dog person, therefore, I own dogs. Always have, always will. (Identity)
- I am high in Conscientiousness (parts of it, anyway) and it makes me very goal and success oriented. (Personality)
- I also am a fan of Country music and while some of that fandom was influenced by upbringing and exposure, I’m also hardwired to subconsciously seek it out to match my values that are, in part, dictated by my Personality. (Personality and Identity)
Choices have causes. Understand the cause, better influence the choices. Not all causes are deep-rooted, inside the person factors, circumstance and context influence plenty of decision making. But, ignoring root-cause, “inside the person” factors like Identity and Personality is like excluding the main ingredient for a cake and expecting a great cake to be baked.
You aren’t selling music. But, here are important fundraising takeaways;
- Identity and Personality influence many of our choices, including our decision to give or not.
- Not all your donors have the same Identities or Personalities.
- Personalized Matching is changing the substance of your appeal to match who people are on the inside.
- The more our messaging matches who they are on the inside, the more likely they are to see it, like it and act on it.
- If you aren’t explicitly doing Personalized Matching you are baking a cake without a main ingredient.
But how do you get “Parent” or Dog lover or Globalist or Activist as a flag on your donor records? Or Personality? You use 3rd party, public data as a proxy for Identity and Personality and match this proxy data to your donor file.
For example, if one of your donors matches to consumer purchase data showing they buy baby food and diapers and subscribe to Parent Magazine, tag that record as a Parent.
Personality proxy data uses rich, detailed profiles for each Personality trait. Importantly, the profiles are very accurate and very different from each other. For example, we know Conscientious people are more likely to be dog owners and conservative and Agreeable people, cat owners and liberal. The profiles are more extensive with 20 or more characteristics describing each one. We match donors to these profiles and see where they fit best and well.
Kevin
5 responses to “You Are Your Music”
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Is part of this an age thing?
Research shows conscientiousness increasing over a lifespan. And I would classify many of the negative correlates with consciousness (emo, punk, neuro, metro, indie, alt, hip-hop, house) as music enjoyed by younger people and the positive correlates (country, folk, soul, blues, jazz, heck – old country has it right in the name) as music enjoyed by older people.
In short, why is it the music that is the determinate, not the age?
Hi Nick, long time no chat, we should get a call on the books. Some of the Big Five traits are correlated with Age, Conscientiousness as you note. But, that correlation is small/weak as is any single attribute that is serving as proxy for Personality.
But, let’s posit that Age causes musical taste. The next question is how or why, by what mechanism? Is it something physical? As people become less mobile they want slower music to match their physical decline? Is it the mere passage of time creating some mythical change? The likely answer is something psychological.
The age correlation with traits is more involved with traits/Personality coming first and life and aging coming second. Any changes that may occur do so with the traits acting as an anchor to determine, in part, the direction and rate of change. They’re a ‘gravitational’ force.
Age isn’t a good explanatory variable for anything. Age only moves in one direction; an explanatory variable has to move in both directions. It’s a psychological and explanatory red herring.
Hi Nick. The goal is to create segments based on the *psychological individuality* of donors and the OCEAN (“Big Five) traits are optimal for this. Not all younger people like emo, punk, alt, etc. and quite a few older people do. You could segment your donors on the basis of age, but that wouldn’t be as effective as segmenting using traits because you’d be overgeneralizing age-related differences. Personalized matching is effective in that the content of the message resonates with the interests, concerns, goals, and values of the donors. Traits are a most important gravitational force for those important content variables. When we define segments using personality traits, age is one of the dozens of proxy variables we use. We have a research database that catalogues the associations of nearly a thousand third-party proxy variables with traits and we use modeling techniques to make valid inferences about donors’ and prospective donors’ traits, and we define our segments on that basis.
Thanks, this is helpful. And would love to catch up!
I thought to myself “self, surely they looked at this in the study.” After the obligatory “don’t call me Shirley” joke, I found the original study and sure enough they did: https://research.atspotify.com/just-the-way-you-are-music-listening-and-personality/
Long story short, age is the best correlate — better than any music preference — of conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional stability. And a pretty good predictor (#2-#5ish) of extraversion.
As for mechanism for how age causes taste, it’s classic explore versus exploit. You explore your tastes when you are young–switching jobs, musical tastes, personalities, partners, etc.–and once you find what works for you, you stick with it.
There’s also nostalgia: a 30-year-old can be taken back to childhood by a hip-hop song; a 70-year-old can’t. A 60-year-old can’t say “I’ve listened to emo all my life.” Or, closer to home, you can probably tell how old I am, plus or minus five years, by knowing I’m a Barenaked Ladies fan. Stefano, you are certainly correct that there are older people who like alt, punk, etc.; but just as the fight isn’t always to the strong and the race to the fast, you’d still want to bet that way.
And since age is the better predictor of the big 5 traits (and we know that things like conscientiousness increases over a lifetime by about a standard deviation), the stronger causal mechanism here would seem to be musical taste is a predictor of age, which is a predictor of personality than there being a direct link.
I’m picking nits of course, because all this adds up to the same conclusion that you had: you want to use the thousands of variables and let modeling tell you where investment is best. So I’d want country versus emo and 70 versus 30 in my rich data stew, as I know you would as well.
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