Between the Global and the National Culture: The Double Social Structure of Listening Music Habits

Current research in cultural stratification is divided between two basic methodological and theoretical approaches. On the one hand, we have the “cultural capital paradigm” that relies on national arts participation and cultural taste surveys as its primary empirical source. On the other hand, we have the “global culture paradigm” which argues that consumption practices must be located in a transnational context that entails a complex network of global flows, including the emergence of a highly structured “world culture” that transcends the usual political and geographical boundaries. That is, the cultural capital paradigm is interested in local differences in stratification whereas in the global culture paradigm the socio-structural determination of cultural choices recedes in importance.

We claim that behind both paradigms there is a struggle between local and global hierarchies of value that can be identify in the Europeans music listening habits. We use the 2001 Euro barometer dataset, which contains the music listening habits of Europeans living in15 European nation-states. The data generation process is modeled as a multilevel mixture factor model in order to uncover the structure of the Europeans music listening habits and simultaneously cluster European nation-states according to their music listening habits. We let the mean value of each indicator as well as the individuals’ factor score to vary randomly.

We found that music listening habits can be classified into two independent hierarchies of values: one of global contemporary music and another of local high/folk hierarchy. The former is associated to individuals’ age and the later to their education and income. Finally we found three clusters of nation-states that differ in the listening habits of their citizens giving support to the double stratification process thesis.