Can Your Taste in Music Predict Your Favorite Films?

We generally tend to think of people's taste in various forms of media as being more or less discrete -- you might like classic rock coming through your speakers while preferring romantic comedies on the screen and science fiction on the page. But according to some recent research, those preferences might actually be connected.

The hardworking data miners at a firm called the Echo Nest have combed through more than 50,000 user accounts at a number of music streaming services (including Rdio, Sirius, MTV and iHeartRadio), and their findings indicate that a person's taste in music can be used to predict their favorite movies (and vice versa). What does this mean? As the Next Web reports, "If you like listening to Jay-Z, your favorite movies are most probably 'Toy Story,' 'Step Brothers,' or 'Elf.' If you like crime movies, you most probably enjoy listening to Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jay-Z, the Who, Bob Dylan, and Pink Floyd in that order."

Aside from connecting specific artists with various genres, the research also correlates listeners' favorite genres with types of listening. Sci-fi fans, for example, are said to be more eclectic music listeners than those who prefer fantasy. And while many of us might like to think of ourselves as too individualistic to conform to this type of broadly applied report, Echo Nest co-founder Brian Whitman says these findings are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of his firm's data.

"We don’t just know that you like a song, we know what the key of that song is, how many times people called it 'sexy' in the past week on blogs, and what instruments are in it," Whitman claimed in a blog post, adding that they can also determine "how often you, and the world, listened, what time of day, and what songs you like to listen to before and after and how diverse your taste is."

Something to consider the next time you're watching 'Big Trouble in Little China' after listening to your favorite polka records. You might feel like an individual, but you're just another point on the graph.