AMP: Artist-based musical preferences derived from free verbal responses and social tags

Operational definitions of music preferences are at the core of psychological research exploring individual differences (personality, expertise) and their relation to a variety of musical behaviors. However, the measurement instruments for music preferences mostly rely on subjective likings for genres, a notion known to be problematic in several ways. We present a framework to derive music preferences based on free responses about liked and disliked artists. The framework utilizes social tags and online databases to aggregate comparable data to the existing genre-based measures. This framework was tested in a sample of 408 participants, who indicated their musical preferences using a genre-based measure and free textual responses. A comparison of both forms of data suggested that a genre-based measure can be reliably recovered from the free responses using the framework. The framework has the advantage of being ecologically valid and flexible in terms of the possible inputs and outputs.