Why do a disproportionately large amount of upper-middle income and more affluent folks like smooth jazz so much?
Corollary 1: commercials on smooth jazz stations tend to be for Lexus dealers, Mercedes dealers, BMW dealers, high-end housing developments, wine, day spas, and high-end restaurants.
Corollary 2: commercials for upscale products on “regular” radio stations, more often than not, play smooth jazz in the background.
Corollary 3: smooth jazz is usually the background music in high-end restaurants.
Corollary 4: a disproportionately large number of upper income friends and acquaintences like smooth jazz. Drop into middle-income demographics, and I find the percentage of smooth jazz fans drops considerably.
FWIW, I can’t stand smooth jazz. It all sounds the same.
I’m not a yuppie & probably like some of the stuff categorized as smooth jazz like Peter White & Marc Antoine. But I like some music in each category & very little in a couple.
> commercials on smooth jazz stations tend to be for Lexus
> dealers, Mercedes dealers, BMW dealers, high-end housing
> developments, wine, day spas, and high-end restaurants.
I don’t think that “yuppies” would be the best description of people who buy such things. I think the biggest market for such products are middle-aged (40-64) people making more than $80,000 a year plus a smaller group of people aged 22-39 making more than $120,000 a year. There’s also a smaller yet group of people 65 and over who have retired with substantial savings and who are still quite active who are interested in such things. But to get more exact figures on the marketing choices of people of various ages and income levels, you would have to ask some of those market research companies that have done surveys about these issues. Many of those companies consider the statistics that they have collected to be proprietary information. They also have information about who listens to smooth jazz.
> smooth jazz is usually the background music in high-end
> restaurants.
I suspect a lot of the people who frequent such restaurants like to listen to other sorts of music in other situations, but they don’t like loud music in those restaurants.
Finally, a lot of market research information ends up being self-fulfilling prophecy. If a marketing research company tells the people selling certain products that they should use a certain type of music, they will do it, even if the correllation between the music and the products that the market researchers found was originally very weak. Soon everybody selling that product uses that kind of music, and the people who buy the product will be listening to that kind of music much more.
Well, corollaries 2 and 3 probably stem from the fact that smooth jazz is ideal background music – quiet, non-distracting, unlikely to offend customers or spark strong feelings in either direction. If you change the music to something with more character, the percentage of people who dislike it will go up, and some of the ones who like it will end up paying attention to the music instead of the commercial.
No clue about 1 and 4, except to note that it’s also ideal music for people who don’t particularly like music but feel compelled to have some on anyway.