Music and Stereotypes

When someone tells me they like country music, I'll be honest, it surprises me when they look like someone that has their own rock band. On the same level, if someone says they prefer heavy metal music, I have a hard time believing them if they are the CEO of a huge oil company. Music preferences is one of the most common "icebreakers" for a conversation. We have our iPods that can carry whole musical libraries and our MySpaces that display information about us while also allowing us to put up music we like at the time. We use music as an "icebreaker" because we think we can key in on certain personality traits or preferences that a person might have. It's something to think about. Another interesting concept with music and stereotypes is have you ever noticed that when someone says they like music from the '50s or '60s, we don't picture someone our own age, we picture someone who was young during that time period? At some point during our lives, we stop listening to the trend-setting music and keep listening to the music that was hip during our adolescent years. There has been some studies done on this topic by Peter Rentfrow and Samuel Gosling. They have found that certain music preferences do correlate with certain personality traits. They did these tests on random college students and then on fans of the actual genre of music. So do you think that by knowing what kind of music a person listens to, you will be able to form an identity for that person without even knowing them personally?