Over the past few decades, quantitative research on musical tastes and consumption has extensively relied on methods involving music genre labels. These methods generally assume participants to share a general and common label knowledge. However, such an assumption has not been empirically tested to date. The present study aimed to (a) estimate adolescents’ ability to identify music genres and (b) examine the influence of social factors on this ability. Results indicated that genre identification constituted a rather difficult task for a majority of participants. They also showed that genre identification depended on social class, age, musical background, and, to a lesser extent, on sex and the importance attached to music. All in all, the study findings further pinpoint the flaws pertaining to genre-based methods and invite sociology researchers to use complementary indicators of musical tastes in the future.

在过去的几十年里，对音乐品味和消费的定量研究广泛依赖于涉及音乐流派标签的方法。这些方法通常假设参与者共享一般和共同的标签知识。然而，迄今为止，这一假设尚未经过实证检验。本研究旨在（a）评估青少年识别音乐流派的能力，以及（b）研究社会因素对这种能力的影响。结果表明，对于大多数参与者来说，类型识别是一项相当困难的任务。他们还表明，流派识别取决于社会阶层、年龄、音乐背景，并且在较小程度上取决于性别和对音乐的重视程度。总而言之，