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Music and adolescents [Video transcript] Skewes McFerran, K. (2019). Music and ado lescents [ Video transcript]. University of Melbourne. Presenter: Professor Katrina Skewes McFerran, The University of Melbourne.

Chapter 1: Music consumption The relationship between young people and their music is powerful. At no time in life are people more committed to music than during their teenage years. This was established in the field of Music Psychology many decades ago, with authors collecting data to confirm teenagers listened to music 2.5 hours per day even in the year 2000 (1), which was before anyone had a phone with all their music on it. Prior to having playlists on our phones, we had mixed tapes, which many of us would carefully create by listening to the radio and pressing record on our cassette recorder when our favourite songs came on. If we were very privileged, we could then listen to these tapes on our Walkman’s from the 1980s, which could contain a maximum of 60 minutes of music on any format. So duration was much shorter and portability was always an issue that impacted how many hours a day you could actually access your music. The development of technologies that allow us all to access music on portable devices has been a revolution to music listeners and by 2010, researchers were beginning to document more like seven hours a day spent listening to music, which included multi-tasking with other media (2), however statistics continue to suggest that about 25 hours per week is a reasonable estimate of how much time people actually describing listening to music . This quantity of consumption reflects my initial statement, that music is important in young people’s lives, but what is even more interesting to consider is why.

Chapter 2: Adolescence and music Before going any further, I would like to clarify my focus on this particular age group. The term ‘adolescence’ has a reasonably short history as an independent stage of development, and it was only in the 1960s that a teenage market for popular music was distinguished from other young adults over the age of 18. In fact, the very construct of a youth market for popular music that was different to other adults only began in the post-WW2 era, where music was a primary agent in creating a new economic and social demographic group, working in tandem with the movies. It’s also important to realise that late adolescence / early adulthood is, the critical period for music preferences to become fixed – not strictly for music that is popular during these years of your life, but whatever music you become aware of during this time is likely to continue to be important to you for decades to come (3).

Chapter 3: Types of music One of the fascinations of adults investigating young people’s music has been the type or style or genre of music that youth enjoy. This is partly because the teenage market has been designed to distinguish itself from the tastes of older adults, starting with Elvis Presley’s provocatively gyrating hips in the 1950s right through to Hip Hop culture in our times. The ways that people have classified the potential categories of music has varied over time, and whenever you are considering music psychology studies that group music into types, it is worth remembering that ‘musical categories can be understood as both a marketing strategy devised by the recording industry as well as a more or less accurate reflection of consumer taste’ (4). What music psychologists tends to do is categorise people based on the types of music that they describe having an affinity with. This can be fairly stereotypical, such as Metal Heads and Pop Fans, or it can be more creative, such as the study conducted by Julian Tanner and colleagues based on the responses of 3,393 students in Toronto, Canada – which is one of the largest and most multicultural cities in the world (5). They created a list of music fans than included Club Kids, Black Stylists, Hard Rockers, New Traditionalists, Ethnic Culturalists, and importantly, abstainers – a category for those who had minimal interest in music, as well as Musical Omnivores. Tanner describes how the idea of musical omnivores was created initially by Richard Peterson to identify those who declare their cultural superiority by the breadth, rather than the narrowness, of their musical interests. In Tanner’s study, this group of young people like all musical genres – pop, classical and Rap music alike – with the solitary exception (and only just) of country music. As with most music psychology studies, the purpose of the investigation was not just to work out what music people like, but also, what other characteristics are associated with people who like that type of music. For example, Tanner’s Musical Omnivores could be characterised as participating in a reasonably high number of peer leisure activities (although

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tellingly, nothing seriously illegal), were often at the older end of the age spectrum and were neither particularly good students, nor especially ambitious ones, including a high number of young people from Asian backgrounds. In the main, they were considered to be more Bohemians than scholars, who were usually in possession of good amount of cultural capital but did not feel under any significant pressure to do anything with it. This contrasts with the Club Kids who liked preferred techno and dance, mainstream pop, and hip-hop and rap, and who were more likely to skip school, unlikely to be ‘A’ students, spent more time involved in peer leisure activities that were particularly hedonistic, and were usually younger teens, with mainly white backgrounds.

As you can hear, most of the music psychology literature about adolescents focuses on music listening rather than music making. In fact, there is quite a lot of music psychology literature that focuses on the correlations between listening to certainly types of music and negative mental health outcomes, a topic we explore a lot more in our partner subject, Music and Health. Some researchers have targeted specific genres, such as metal music, and then designed studies to see what scores metal fans get on a range of other measures. Sometimes these studies are extremely biased – for example, Steven Stack who used heavy metal magazine subscriptions as a variable that he compared to data contained on the annual Mortality Detail Files in one state of American, and then interpreted the results to conclude that ‘The greater the strength of heavy metal subculture, the greater the youth suicide rate’ (6)! Although I find that kind of research biased, he has been cited more than 8,000 times for his research in this area.

Chapter 4: Music and adolescent wellbeing Correlations are a very loose way to draw conclusions about people, and it is not good science to leap from a correlation to suggesting a causation – but that is what many people do in this space. My own research has been much more focused on how young people use music as a resource in their lives, but even so, there has been a tendency for young people to report relying on music make them feel better during difficult times, even when it is making them feel, at least temporarily worse (7). What I have discovered is that many factors influence how young people use music in helpful and unhelpful ways and that it is difficult, but not impossible to generalise about. But no matter how you look at it, music listening has not been proven to have a causative influence on people’s wellbeing. It tends to reflect more about an individual adolescent than it makes them become anything they are not already. But it is powerful, and never more powerful than in our adolescent years. So enjoy it and make sure it is working for you.

References 1. North AC, Hargreaves, D.J. & O'Neill, S.A. The importance of music to adolescents. British Journal of Educational Psychology. 2000;70(Pt 2):255-72. 2. Rideout VJ, Foehr UG, Roberts DF. Generation M2: Media in the lives of 8- to 18-year-olds. Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation; 2010. 3.

North AC, Hargreaves DJ. The social and applied psychology of music. New York: Oxford University Press; 2008.

4. Frith S. Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century. Contemporary Sociology. 1999;28(5):579. 5. Tanner, J., Asbridge, M., & Wortley, S. (2008). Our favourite melodies: musical consumption and teenage lifestyles. British Journal of Sociology, 59(1), 117–144. 6. Stack, S., Gundlach, J., & Reeves, J. L. (1994). The heavy metal subculture and suicide. Suicide and LifeThreatening Behavior, 24(1), 15–23. 7. McFerran KS, Saarikallio S. Depending on music to make me feel better: Who is responsible for the ways young people appropriate music for health benefits. The Arts in Psychotherapy. 2013;41(1):89-97.

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