February 2, 2005: BMTG Conducts Audio Taste Test
By Ahchie

There has always been a certain segment of society that will criticize whatever is popular just so it can feel they are not getting sucked in by the mainstream. The phenomena can be seen in many walks of life, but is perhaps most pronounced in music. This crowd, the “cool crowd” we will call them, will rave about a band they like as long as it hasn’t become mainstream. As soon as the band becomes mainstream they are said to have “sold out” and you will hear phrases like, “I really like their older stuff better.” When a new band jumps on the scene seemingly out of nowhere, you will hear about how “lame” they are and how they are “poseurs” and “wannabes” who are imitating some classic band of the past. At some point, all of the “new stuff” will become “older stuff”, and all that “older stuff” was, once upon a time, “new stuff”, but that seems to escape the consciousness of the cool crowd.

There seems to be a desire by the cool crowd to be the one to discover a band before anyone else does. A typical statement would be, “I’ve been listening to them since they were playing at the [insert regional little known hot spot].” They take pride in being able to rattle off obscure band names that they are currently into. This whole attitude is what has helped to bring about so many different johnras (BMTG official spelling) of music. Punk rock, alternative rock, rap, hip hop, and grunge are just a few examples of music that started out as being favored by those not liking the mainstream. As these types became mainstream the cool crowd would, on the outside, pretend to long for the old days when their music was not filled with such poseurs and wannabes, but on the inside were feeling smug and proud that their “discovery” made it to the big time. What they don’t realize is that in the end they are just tools being manipulated by the industry. The music industry knows the cool crowd better that the cool crowd knows itself.

The BMTG’s theory is that if you could take one mainstream band and switch it with an obscure band, the cool crowd would shun the obscure band, while the mainstream band would all of a sudden be seen as highly original. The point is that it is not the band or its music that is being judged. The band is being shunned or praised based solely on the status the band holds. The lesser known a band is, the better it is in the eyes of the cool crowd listener. In an effort to prove this theory, the BMTG recently conducted its own blind audio taste test.

The audio taste test was simple. The first group (Group A) of cool crowd subjects was asked what bands and artists they liked and disliked and then were presented with a variety of music, some of which was mainstream and some was obscure. The subjects were not told the names of the bands or the titles of songs and were placed in isolated areas where the only input they had was the audio from the music.

The second group (Group B) of cool crowd subjects was asked the same questions and listened to the same music, but were also told the name of the bands and the titles of the songs.

The final group (Group C) of cool crowd subjects was asked the same questions and listened to the same music, but instead of being told the artist names and song titles, they were told only incorrect artist names without the song titles. The purpose of testing this group was to see how ratings would be affected when the listener thought a certain artist was performing.

Naturally, the biggest obstacle was the difficulty of presenting mainstream music to Group A that the subjects would not immediately recognize. This actually turned out to be less of an obstacle than the BMTG thought it would be, as, surprisingly, many of the subjects were not able to distinguish with any reliable accuracy which bands were mainstream and which bands were relative unknowns.

The BMTG discovered that, without the benefit of knowing the names of the bands and without the knowledge of how popular the music is, the Group A subjects were forced to form judgments based only on the sound, instead of the band’s status. Their preferences had no connection with which group of bands the music came from, as they liked and disliked bands equally from both the mainstream and the obscure groups.

While the BMTG was not surprised by the results, the test subjects from Group A were shocked at which groups they liked and disliked. Many found that artists they rated highly before the test did not fare very well, while artists they rated very low before the test did better than what they thought were their favorites. In one of the more extreme cases, one professed old school Black Sabbath fan discovered that he really liked Kelly Clarkson, until he later found out it was an American Idol winner that he was giving such high marks to.

As suspected would happen, Group B ranked the mainstream artists much lower and the obscure artists much higher than Group A. Group A also gave higher overall rankings than both Groups B and C. Even music that Group A subjects did not like as much got higher rankings from Group A than from the other groups. Interestingly, the extremes of high marks and low marks were much more pronounced in Group B, indicating that the Group B subjects may have had a tendency to form quick judgments and may have already decided where to rank the music based on its perceived status.

Group C was clearly affected by thinking they knew who the artist was. Many artists that were ranked highly by Group B saw their ratings plummet when Group C ranked their music. A prime example from this group was the ranking of Elvis Costello. Group B listeners gave Costello high marks, while group C listeners, who were told they were listening to another artist, gave Costello’s music much lower rankings. By contrast, artists that received low marks from both Group A and Group B, got higher marks from Group C when the listeners were told that they were listening to Elvis Costello.

An interesting note about mainstreamers is that artists that were considered mainstream 10 or more years ago got overall higher marks from Group B than artists that are new to the mainstream today. Some of the lower rankings of today’s mainstreamers were attributed to radio overkill, but the BMTG found that radio airplay did not actually have a significant overall effect on the rankings from all three groups.

Average Rankings (based on scale of 1 to 10)
Music Category	Group A	Group B	Group C
Established Mainstream (10 or more years)	7.1	5.4	6.5
Mainstream (3 to 9 years)	6.7	2.9	6.6
New Mainstream (1 to 2 years)	7.3	4.1	6.9
Non-mainstream, relative unknowns	6.8	7.7	6.0

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