(Credits: Far Out)
Wed 11 February 2026 20:00, UK
It’s a fascinating and mysterious wonder as to how our musical genre tastes are shaped.
We can make speculative guesses. Just like sexual proclivities, taste in food, or learnt behaviours and mannerisms, our internal musical antenna may have been brought about by some degree of nurturing and social hone, be it the houses we grew up in or our teen peers’ influence, but fundamentally our creative intuitions and artistic preference can never be entirely scientifically gleaned.
We all may differ on musical genres, but virtually everyone likes music, period. From the dawn of time across every far-flung culture, be it the metropolitan urban dweller to the uncontacted Amazonian tribe, the joy in hearing music, its pleasing aural patterns, sensory arousal to dance, and satisfaction at crafting harmonies or melodies are a near constant of the human condition, despite its lack of survival necessity.
As Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker puts it, “Music appears to be a pure pleasure technology, a cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest through the ear to simulate a mass of pleasure circuits at once.”
Yet, all of us want food, but one will baulk at the idea of a juicy hamburger, while another eyes up such a dish with wide-eyed salivation. Such curious differences amid a fundamental universalism were explored by a recent Headphonesty research piece, surveying thousands of music fans as the genre that irked them the most.
Five most hated genres, according to science: