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Reading about the Posse's gatherings, one hears Bourdieu talking about the “spectacular delights” of working-class art forms: “They satisfy the taste for and sense of revelry, the plain speaking and hearty laughter which liberate by setting the social world head over heels, overturning conventions and proprieties.” The music itself may be beside the point. This was like a return in a sense to older rituals of music—not as an isolated object of casual consumption on a massive playlist, but as a means of forging a group identity. That neither the music nor that social
group seems particularly loved only sharpened its cohesion. This was a refuge from taste, an oasis of tolerance in opposition to the mores of everyone else, including the supposedly tolerant omnivores. Bourdieu wrote, “
People's image of the classification is a function of their position within it.” Or, as the writer Kent Russell put it, “
you can be a juggalo or you can be white trash—the first term is yours, the second is somebody else's.”

People label music; music labels people. The way those labels match up or do not between particular people and music is interesting. As always, however, the more revealing action is in what people say they do not like, rather than in what they do.

On a Saturday evening in 1950, the Danish Broadcasting Service played a series of unidentified songs it labeled “popular gramophone music.” On the following Saturday, the evening when listenership was typically at its peak, the service played a program of music it called “classical.” As you might expect, the audience was larger—by a factor of two—for the first program.

There is an interesting twist to the story, however. On both Saturdays, the same set of recordings was played. Only in the second week were the titles (with key, opus number, and so on) mentioned. Danish listeners, unbeknownst to them, were being subjected to an experiment by Theodor Geiger, a sociologist at the University of Aarhus. The Danish Broadcasting Service had been concerned about the public's seeming lack of regard for classical and “
the more serious kind of modern music.” But Geiger wanted to know this: Did people not really like classical music? Or did they just think they were not supposed to like it, because they lacked musical expertise or it was not “appropriate” for their social class?

Curiously, during the first week's listening, the number of listeners actually increased during the program. It was not as if people were being lured in by the “popular” tag and then, encountering music that Geiger described as “by no means too ear-pleasing,” abandoned the show. Listeners mostly stayed. Some people—presumably classical
fans—even called in to crankily ask why the music was being called “popular.”

For Geiger, the experiment had a singular lesson: “The public has a more refined musical taste than it likes to admit.” Or, to say it with less of that tweedy whiff of 1950s “highbrow” thinking, what the music was labeled
as
influenced how many people would listen. There is no way to know what was going on in the minds of listeners. Did they
actually
like the music? Or perhaps the designation “popular” was a signal they should like it because, apparently, others did. Why would “classical” seem to put them off? Was it a problem with the music or the labeling?

The larger question is, how often does our “taste” get in the way of what we might actually like? What if someone like Bourdieu, the French philosopher Jacques Rancière asked, had presented music to his subjects without the trappings of socioeconomic classification, the way the Argentine composer Miguel Ángel Estrella hauled his piano to “a village on the Andean plateau” and simply played, to his peasant audience, by trial and error? The villagers, it turned out, seemed to prefer Bach. And the name Bach by itself, it seems, can sway liking.
In one study, people liked the same piece of music more when it was described as being by Bach versus a fictitious composer named Buxtehude.
Tell people that Hitler liked a certain music? They will like it less than if you simply call it “romantic.” It recalls Paul Rozin's experiments on disgust and “sympathetic magic”:
He once served subjects chocolate fudge shaped like dog feces. The mere association was enough to put most people off. Hitler was not the
author
of the music in the experiment, any more than the dog feces were real. But it had been symbolically contaminated. In taste, the symbolic is real enough.

In the early days of Pandora, the popular online music service, one of its founders, Tim Westergren, proposed something radical: What if the listener were shown no information about what was playing?

“The idea,” he told me, “was that our appreciation of music is so deeply affected by our preconceived notions of what an artist stands for, what a genre means. You don't listen to music objectively. People have a knee-jerk reaction to an artist based on something that's not musical.” This had helped inspire Pandora's Music Genome Project, the vast web of hand-coded musicological attributes driving what it plays for you.
“The idea of the genome was to strip that down, to make choices based on musicology,” he said. Like using DNA to locate distant relatives, the genome could point you to music that shared secret bloodlines. “Getting rid of the names and pictures of the artist would be a way of making the listener do the same.” The idea, he said, “was deemed stupid.”

Before starting Pandora, Westergren worked as a film composer. His job was to find the right musical style for a film but also to discern the director's taste. “I would play someone a bunch of songs and get their feedback,” he said. “I was trying to map their preferences.” He compares it to the children's game Battleship. “It is literally like that, feeling around for what the shape of their taste was.” This was the spirit of Pandora: trying to codify that taste-mapping process by playing you a bunch of songs and registering your feedback.

Something else haunted him. He had read an article about the singer Aimee Mann and her struggles to get her music distributed. “This is a woman who has a fan base,” he said. “There must be some way to more cost-effectively connect them with her.” Perhaps there were people who might like Aimee Mann—because she shared certain musical attributes with other artists they already knew and liked—if they could only hear her. Think about how many times artists have been lifted from obscurity by their placement in a film soundtrack, such as the Proclaimers' song “I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles).” A movie is a place where, like Westergren's early idea, music comes at us rather blind, without preconceptions. You do not know what it is or who is singing it. You
have
to listen to it.

The most fundamental factor in liking a song is whether you have heard it before. Exposure, as with food, is key: The more you hear something, the more you will like it (there are exceptions I will return to).
There is a huge body of literature about the effects of exposure. In one typical study, when groups of English children and college students were played samples of unfamiliar Pakistani folk music, they liked it more the more they heard it. This is how DJs help make hits. The Echo Nest's Whitman admitted he was jealous of radio in that it had no “skip button.” “Maybe some DJ out there did have insight into the fact that if you heard ‘Bohemian Rhapsody' twenty times,” he said, “that operatic thing got wired in your brain and became something you liked.”

Many psychologists argue that as we are repeatedly exposed to a stimulus—like music, or shapes, or Chinese ideograms—our “perceptual
fluency” increases, and we learn to process that thing more easily.
We translate this ease of processing, which itself feels good, into feelings for the thing itself. As the psychologist Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis puts it, we do not necessarily think, seeing a triangle for the fourth time, “
I've seen that triangle before, that's why I know it.” Instead, people think, “Gee, I like that triangle. It makes me feel clever.” The more “prototypical” things are, the easier they are to process.
People in studies have tended to find digitally morphed composites of faces (or
birds or cars or shapes) more attractive than any single face or bird or car, because in that averageness lies a greater chance for the thing to look like what a person thinks that thing should look like.

Even the order in which we hear things seems to influence liking. In one study, radio listeners were played a series of original songs and cover versions. As you might expect, people liked the original version when they themselves were older and when a lot of time had passed between versions. Those fans had been “exposed” to the original more. But for listeners who were hearing both versions for the first time, which they preferred depended on which they had heard first. “
A first encountered stimulus,” the authors suggested, “leaves more of a mental mark, as a result of which it is processed more fluently than later encountered related stimuli.”

Before it had a name, the exposure effect was talked about like a kind of tautology: We like things that are familiar because we like their familiarity.
The problem with that analysis, as Robert Zajonc, the psychologist and author of the term, noted, was that things people were liking were not necessarily what they better remembered. In some cases, he said, we may actually like things more upon repeated exposure when we have
not
been aware we have been exposed to them.

Years ago, I was traveling through Mexico when I suddenly noticed a song on the radio: “Burbujas de Amor,” by the Dominican singer Juan Luis Guerra. It was, that year, inescapable. Why did that song jump out at me? Sure, it was catchy, but so was everything else played on the radio. It was the sort of song, with my usual taste, I might even have deemed a little cheesy. I probably heard it several times before it actually seeped into my consciousness. I began to slowly recognize the beat, to anticipate his now-familiar “ay ay ay ay!” refrain. Then someone told me that the lyrics, which I was barely beginning to grasp in my fledgling Spanish—more perceptual fluency—were filled with saucy double
entendres. My fluency increased. And suddenly, without my having gone out of my way to acquire an appreciation for
bachata
ballads, I
liked
the song, and only because I had the chance to be exposed to it, time after time, on Mexican buses and in Mexican bars.

Liking is learning, and learning is liking—even if we are not always aware of it. In music, the arc of liking can be incredibly fast, within a few listens. One night, in the summer of 1985, when the “house music” scene was in full fledge in Chicago, a clarinetist and aspiring DJ was experimenting, along with a few of his teenage friends, with a Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer. As they twiddled the knobs, strange sounds began to emerge. They particularly liked the machine's “live” bass guitar. Not because it seemed like a good live bass, but because, as one put it, “it sounded like something you can dance to.” The music critic Bob Stanley dubbed it the sound of a “melting brain.”

One night, the crew took a tape titled “In Your Mind” to a club called the Music Box and gave it to the DJ. “
The first time he played it the crowd didn't know how to react,” one of the crew recalled. “Then he played it a second time and the crowd started to dance. The third time he played it people started to scream. The fourth time he played it people were dancing on their hands. It took control over them.” In virtually one night, a new genre was born, called acid house, after the idea there might have been something in the club's water that evening. How many music careers were stalled because a song never got that proverbial second listen?

Exposure contains a hidden peril: We begin to like some things
less
the more we are exposed to them—
especially the things we disliked before.
There is no exact formula to this, but one leading theory, offered by the psychologist Daniel Berlyne, is that our liking for things like music follows an inverted U-shaped graph, based on the factor of “complexity.” We like things less the more simple or complex they are. The sweet spot, for most people, is somewhere in the middle.

Each time we listen to that music, however, it gets less complex. So the infectious pop song built around a simple beat that tears up the charts one summer might quickly fall off the liking cliff. Another song, more intricately arranged, full of deeper melodies and meanings, might slowly ascend in our estimation. Nick Drake's
Pink Moon
, with its
densely poetic lyrics and complex chords, missed the 1972 English pop charts by a mile. Yet you are far more likely to have heard the album's title song in the past few years—in films, in commercials, on the radio—than one of the
top
songs of that year: Donny Osmond's “Puppy Love” or Chuck Berry's “My Ding-a-Ling.” It is as if it took longer to like Nick Drake.
When the Beatles' catalog is arranged by complexity, note the music scholars Adrian North and David Hargreaves, albums such as
Please Please Me
, chart toppers in their day, have enjoyed less lasting popularity than more musically and lyrically complex works such as
Abbey Road
.

It is much the same with food. Our liking for sweetness, for example, tends to follow a similar inverted U shape—too much or too little, and the liking goes down. The food researcher Howard Moskowitz, in a consumer test of a “garlic-flavored condiment,” had people try different versions of the product, each with differing levels of particular flavors. “
As the condiment becomes stronger, liking of taste increases,” he wrote, which makes sense. He then noted another curious effect. “But so does potential boredom.” What is exciting the first few times quickly becomes tiring. It may be a kind of perceptual fluency. “Oh, you can really taste the garlic!” you say the first time. “Hmmm, there's that garlic!” you say the second. By the third sample, all you taste is garlic.
If, as Moskowitz argued,
colas were popular because we cannot tell what is really in them, then a genre like jazz might be the cola of music; pop music, meanwhile, might be orange soda—fun the first few times, but quickly cloying.
Music scholars have even used the word “satiation” to describe a phenomenon, observed in studying the old
Your Hit Parade
, that the faster a song had risen into the Top 10, the more quickly it left, as if we binged too quickly and were having a post-sugar-rush comedown.