I often wonder why people like some of the music I dislike – or why I like the music that I do.  Turns out that some of it might just be a matter of liking what you are used to.  I read about a study in which the guys were trying to show that people like what they know – the ‘familiarity effect’.  They took a batch of rats and raised half listening to Schoenberg, the other half listening to Mozart.  Later, they put the adult rats into a cage in which they could choose the music playing by moving to a certain side of the cage.  Guess which music they preferred…

The familiarity effect has also been shown to be present in humans.  So maybe if I listened to enough hip-hop then I could actually learn to like it.