Do Music Preferences Reflect Cultural Values? A Cross-National Analysis Using Music Embedding and World Values Survey

TL;DR

This paper investigates how national music preferences, analyzed through embeddings and semantic descriptions, reflect underlying cultural values and align with established cultural zones across 62 countries.

Contribution

It introduces a novel cross-national analysis combining music embeddings, semantic captions, and cultural survey data to reveal cultural signals in music preferences.

Findings

Music clusters align with cultural zones defined by WVS

Significant statistical association between music preferences and cultural values

Overrepresented patterns suggest non-random cultural encoding in music

Abstract

This study explores the extent to which national music preferences reflect underlying cultural values. We collected long-term popular music data from YouTube Music Charts across 62 countries, encompassing both Western and non-Western regions, and extracted audio embeddings using the CLAP model. To complement these quantitative representations, we generated semantic captions for each track using LP-MusicCaps and GPT-based summarization. Countries were clustered based on contrastive embeddings that highlight deviations from global musical norms. The resulting clusters were projected into a two-dimensional space via t-SNE for visualization and evaluated against cultural zones defined by the World Values Survey (WVS). Statistical analyses, including MANOVA and chi-squared tests, confirmed that music-based clusters exhibit significant alignment with established cultural groupings. Furthermore, residual analysis revealed consistent patterns of overrepresentation, suggesting non-random associations between specific clusters and cultural zones. These findings indicate that national-level music preferences encode meaningful cultural signals and can serve as a proxy for understanding global cultural boundaries.