Omnivorousness comment: the system of genre hierarchies is effected by omnivorousness. It is not stable, just as tastes are not stable. Styles of music that are “low/middlebrow” at T1, consumed by elites at T2, are not properly understood as “low/middlebrow” at T3. 1/

Elite consumption has consequences. Moreover, the genre labels stay the same, but the music contained within that set grows more diverse over time, interrupted stochastically by the emergence of new categories as profit opportunities appear. 2/

So, the “distances” between industry genre labels is not stable over time. Consequently, the social “distance” listeners reach in order to enjoy multiples is similarly not a set of standard units. 3/

So there are several IMO profound problems with "measuring omnivorousness" if you treat industry genre labels as emic taste preferences. Profound problems if you treat genres as coherent/stable content over time. 4/

And profound problems if you treat the "distances" between "genres" as all having units of "1." 5/

I cannot emphasize enough that we have really serious validity and reliability problems dogging research in this field, and replication papers using 90s research are gonna face this critique (if I'm a reviewer).

And to make the social consequences clear: genres are racialized, as are taste communities. As I am at PAINS to demonstrate in Entitled ( @PrincetonUPress), white Americans "liked" "black" music/art as a means to maintain their social & cultural superiority.

Unroll @threadreaderapp