How big is the fence around music genres? An empirical analysis of people's classification of artists and bands within music genres

Music genre classifications pervade, in record shops, on the radio, on the web, in surveys, etc. Yet, classifying music into genres is no easy task, certainly given the pertinence of genres as symbolic markers, as means for social distinction. In this paper we want to investigate to what extent genre boundaries are permeable and differ according to the characteristics of the classifier. More specifically, we analyze how people classify favored artists and bands within given music genres using data from an audience survey conducted in Flanders (Belgium) in 2007 (n = 878). Our main objectives are twofold. We first try to visualize distances between genres and between different artists/bands both within and between genres. Second, we want to probe into how differing classifications are socially embedded. In this way we hope to gain insight on the versatility of artist-genre connections, on the breadth of artists/bands included within a certain genre (and thus indirectly on the measurement of omnivorousness), and finally on the social structuring of certain classifications