A few weeks ago I started talking about music's role in dating, and I left off promising some corroboration for my views. Here it is!

I started by cruising random men's profiles on the free dating website PlentyofFish.com (POF; it's the site I originally used and, like I said, it's free). I came across the music eclectic/hipster type first:

     'I'm that guy who listens to The Shins, Motown, but also has a love of techno.'

Amazing. What next? A couple of my favourite, the 'I love everything except the things I don't' type:

     'I like all types of music, classic rock to heavy metal, blues, jazz, everything but country and rap.'

     'Love all sorts of music excluding rap.'

Aw, poor country and rap – they seem to be the most common exclusions.

Next are some variations on the last type. Here we get a little more qualification – even honesty? – regarding taste. The aim is to appear all-inclusive whilst hinting at the much narrower selection that's actually preferred:

'Love the country living, not the music! Sorry can't stand it. I listen to almost everything else, but my tastes generally lean towards the heavier stuff.'

'I love all kinds of music, but tend to lean towards the more aggressive styles.'

'I play a lot of House-Electronic music, but listen to almost everything.'

Finally, we have the 'music is my life' type:

'I've been playing guitar since 2002 and piano/keyboards since 2007. I love music of all types and am constantly trying to find new sounds and new ways to mix existing styles. I love progressive rock/metal, death metal, psychedelic trance, jazz, blues, classic rock, classical music, basically you name it.'

Progressive and classic rock, you say?!

'Looking for someone who loves music -- My name is [Tim] I love music I play in a hardcore/punk/electronica band called [Fluffy Bunnies]
www.[redacted].com/[fluffybunnies]
and i have a solo accoustic project called [Yellow Balloons]
www.[redacted].com/[yellowballoons]
I'm looking for someone who loves music and loves to have a good time.

This constitutes his entire 'About Me' section! Not sure if he's looking for a date or a promoter...

There could be more types, but the above is pretty representative of what you're going to find in men's profiles time and again on online dating sites, even while the genres and bands change across demographics. For both men and women, you'll also often find phrases along the lines of 'if you like this or that band/genre, we should get along!' showing that many people rely heavily on music as indicators of overall compatibility. As one female user wrote in her profile 'I truly believe that what u listen defines who u are.' Of course, there are also lots guys who mention their musical tastes as casually as other aspects of their lives (hobbies, work, movies), but for those who weight music heavily, these general types remain amazingly stable and common.

As I was compiling these profile excerpts, I started to feel that this browsing approach wasn't sufficient, so I hit upon another method. In addition to the 'About Me' sections quoted above, every POF profile has an 'Interests' box which users can customise by selecting items from a list or by entering their own manually. Profiles can then be searched according to interest, although this can be tricky because the system is not sophisticated enough to group together alternate spellings; searches for 'theatre' and 'theater' will return different results. Another hitch is that only a maximum of 700 hits can be given in any search, but there are some tedious ways to get around this. Despite these issues, I decided it would still be an interesting exercise to compare the frequency of the same musical interests between MSF (male seeking female) and FSM (female seeking male) users.

Searching for particular artists or groups was way too subjective and variable (for now, at least), so I decided to restrict my searches to musical instruments, activities, and genres. I further limited the search to Canada only and ages 18-35; this kept the results accountable for the most part.

I have no way of knowing of how many members are in each gender group, but if we can assume they're even somewhat close (say, 60%-40%), the results for the twenty-five+ interests I looked up are extremely disproportionate. Other factors such as age, ethnicity, class, and income bracket may also skew the results in unknowable directions, but given that POF is free and ranks at or near the top in number of registered users, unique hits, and so on, it seems a good choice for getting a broad cross-section of people to poll.

The Results

First, FSM outnumbered MSF in only a single category. One in twenty-five! Further still, the MSF hits exceeded the FSM ones at usually at least double rate, and more often triple or higher. Check out these genres results:

* results combined for these two terms

I searched for other types of music, too, but you get the idea. Will the ratios change for musical instruments? Nope:

**This is a minimum number for this category; results couldn't be broken further to get an exact tally, but I'd wager that the truer figure is closer to 15,000.

However, here we encounter the solitary musical interest where straight women outnumber straight men:

But when we move into other music-making activities, the disparity widens again:

Finally, the musical interest that I think sums up this whole phenomenon in the best and most telling manner:

While I mentioned above the difficulty in quantifying the effects of ethnicity, age, etc., on these numbers (i.e., are there any over- or under-represented demographics?), we can juxtapose the results of sexual orientation more easily and find some interesting outcomes to compare.

Here are figures for gay men (MSM) and women (FSF) for the same interests listed previously:

The results are a bit all over the place, but what strikes me most is that several of the stereotypically 'manly' interests (metal, guitar, DJing, drums, rap) are more commonly listed by gay women than gay men. On the other hand, singing remains as popular with gay women as with straight women, while most of everything else is a mixed bag.

Given the low numbers of musical interests overall, does this mean that gay people of either gender rely less on music as a signifier of status in the dating process than straight people, especially straight men? Possibly, but none of this is to say that any gender or orientation is in fact more engaged with music than the others. Rather, certain demographics make greater use of music as a tactical display to communicate a range of information about themselves and their tastes. In some cases, it may only be fodder for starting a conversation, while in others it seems intended as a preview of one's personality and lifestyle.

However, if you're a hyper 'music is the fabric of my being' person, perhaps the best place for you to go is a site where you can 'meet new people who share your love for music.' You can also have every ounce of your profile data-mined since the platform is powered by/linked with Last.fm, Facebook, and bunch of other sites, but at least you'll be able to participate in surveys gauging your level of promiscuity on the first date according to which bands you like best. Balance?

An oft-cited bit of pop science trivia regarding the origins of music is that it was invented as means to aid males in sexual selection. That is, it helped guys impress ladies not only by being entertaining, but also by displaying their endurance, physical fitness, and, um, co-ordination. While that statement is frequently disputed as bogus, it's also mentioned from time to time that musicians often fall for each other – something about the act of collective music-making either indicating romantic compatibility or in fact facilitating it through the mutual attentiveness and co-operation that comes with playing in an ensemble.

One real-life example to support this argument occurred on my music undergrad orientation day when one of the speakers proclaimed that for several years running 'the music faculty had had the highest rate of intra-faculty marriages at the university.' I don't recall what the statistic was, but I do remember that if it held steady, there were going to be, we were told, 14 married couples by the time us first-year students graduated. Of course, this was your more or less traditional classical music training program. Are there similar stats for people in rock bands and jazz programs?

I have no idea, but, really, it's not terribly mind-blowing that people who like to do the same collaborative activity would tend to like each other. Further still, I'm not interested in the outcome of the music and romance mix. I want to consider what happens with music during the dating process, how it's used, displayed, and talked about.

I got thinking about this as a result of my own personal experiences (so if you want to read about the evolution or neuroscience of music, check out stuff by Oliver Sacks or Daniel Levitin). I learnt quickly in undergrad to hide, mislead, or outright lie about my popular music studies major when in certain social settings outside of school because inevitably someone – a guy, mostly – would seem compelled to emphatically tell me why band X was awesome or sucked, or that I was simply incorrect on anything that didn't match with his opinion. That this behaviour was occasionally mixed in with some attempt at flirting made it all the more bizarre to me. Don't get me wrong -- I'm all for a healthy debate based on a disagreement, but that's not what this was. This was a demonstration of (male) ownership over a(n historically male-controlled) domain.

In my experiences, certain guys like it when they meet a girl or woman who knows about popular music; it's apparently a 'hawt' trait (classical and jazz are a different ball of wax that I'm not even going to touch in this post). But they don't like it when that trait is perceived as undermining their own perceived authority on the subject. Contradict a guy about music, or use your knowledge to make his claims demonstrably false, and you could be in for a rough time.

Of course, not all guys have their identity as heavily invested in music as others, so you're much less likely (if at all) to get this kind reaction from a guy who 'likes,' 'enjoys,' or is 'into' music than from one for whom music is an all-consuming 'passion' or who is involved music-making himself; wannabe rockstars are definitely the worst offenders in this area. A guy doesn't even have to be interested in you to get upset. I once worked with a congenial and happily married man who became incensed when I wouldn't agree with his belief that 'rap isn't music.' I tried to carefully detail my thoughts as to why I think it is, but all I got in return were repeated shouts of 'No! No it isn't!!' before I fled his office.

A lot of this has to do with music's role in the self-construction of identity. Certain people integrate their musical preferences and beliefs so deeply into their self-image that they're going to react badly whenever anybody – regardless of gender or other situational dynamics – suggests something that doesn't line up with their own views in the right way. Women can behave this way as well, but it does appear to be much more common among men and is a hair-trigger for some of them to boot. I once made passing reference to metal being a form of popular music to a group of die-hard metal fans, all guys, who also happened to be old acquaintances of mine. Instant acrimony:

"Pssshh! Metal isn't the same as that Celine Dion crap!”

“That's pop music, which, yeah, is different. But I'm talking about popular music, which includes both those genres and a lot more. Think of popular music as an umbrella category or department of music, like jazz or classical, not as a single genre or style.”

Try as I might, though, I couldn't convince them. The simple fact that I had brought metal anywhere close to a genre they despised (so they thought) was enough for them discount anything further I said.

But back to dating. The next time music's role stood out to me was when I decided to have a go at online dating. It was strange seeing these lists of bands and genres featuring just as prominently, sometimes even more so, as an individual's biographical information. More awkward was that after revealing my own music background and profession in emails or IM chats, guys would want to send me links to their band or record label. I make critical value judgements of music for a living, do you really want to immediately give me the same criteria on which to judge you? Apparently they did.

It struck me as all very strutting peacock, and stood out especially because women didn't seem to be as ostentatious or declamatory about their musical preferences and activities as men. Sure, women made use of band and genre lists as a semiotic shorthand of their personalities, but less often were they so 'in your face' about how awesome the awesome music they listened to, produced, or played was awesome and made their life awesome.

Not convinced? I wondered myself if my thinking was too tainted by my own personal experiences, so I decided to go back and try to recreate part of my original encounters with online dating in order to include the results here. It didn't take long. Details about the results will appear in the weeks to come!