This study investigates how people feel about and behave toward different types of music, based on a major U.S. national survey (N = 17,254). Attendance at musical events is quite common, and there is widespread enjoyment of music in that the average person reports listening to several different types of music. A measure of distance between preferences and behaviors toward types of music and multidimensional scaling indicates that music is evaluated socially in terms of its formality and ecological appeal. Behavioral data and attitudinal data yield essentially the same dimensional structure of the types of music for the aggregate audience.
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