WVS Webinar on October 7.Do Music Preferences Reflect Cultural Values? A Cross-National Analysis Using Music Embedding and World Values Survey
Registration: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/Bm9v7vc3Rs-wQFMKZojFBQ
Music is often described as a universal language, yet musical tastes continue to vary substantially across countries and cultural regions. This study asks whether these differences are simply matters of musical style or whether they also contain traces of deeper cultural patterns.
Drawing on YouTube Music Charts covering 62 countries over the period 2017–2025, the authors use computational methods to construct national music profiles based on thousands of popular songs. Rather than relying on conventional genre classifications, they use audio embeddings to capture acoustic and semantic characteristics of music and AI-based captioning to provide interpretable descriptions of the resulting musical patterns.
The study then compares clusters of countries identified through their music preferences with the cultural zones of the World Values Survey. The results reveal a substantial correspondence between the two classifications: countries with similar popular-music profiles frequently belong to the same or closely related WVS cultural zones. The analysis therefore opens an intriguing broader question: to what extent can behavioural data from digital platforms complement survey research in identifying and understanding cultural differences across societies?The webinar will discuss both the substantive findings and the methodological possibilities created by bringing together computational music analysis, digital behavioural data, and cross-national survey research. Read full paper here.
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