The Null Device

Musical tastes of IT workers

A UK "accelerated learning" company recently did a survey of the contents of MP3 players owned by various types of IT professionals and found relationships between career niches and musical tastes. Microsoft weenies, apparently, are into shiny mainstream pop like Britney Spears and Dido, penguinheads are into "electro" like The Orb and Kraftwerk (and, I imagine, a lot of industrial/EBM bands the researchers haven't heard of), developers are into metal (Megadeth, Iron Maiden and Slipknot), and the coolsie chat types who listen to The Smiths and Suede tend to congregate around database administration careers for some reason. Project managers are into Queen and the Rolling Stones, security wonks are into '60s psychedelia (maybe it's the beards or someting?), whereas, for the management, it's all classical music. Nope, no stereotypes here.

(In the office where I'm working, the soundtrack is the iTunes collection of one of the programmers, constantly playing quietly on loop/shuffle. It consists of a combination of metal, commercial pop and Radiohead.)

There are 2 comments on "Musical tastes of IT workers":

Posted by: threeze
http://neuralvoid.com
Thu Jul 22 01:16:53 2004

i was looking to see what EBM stuff would pop up. in our office we have a wide variety ranging from Shpongle to Pink Floyd to AC/DC to Portishead to VNV Nation to Placebo. i would kill someone if we had to listen to the same stuff over and over and over again.

Posted by: acb
http://dev.null.org
Thu Jul 22 04:07:49 2004

The iTunes guy in the office has a lot of Placebo as well, as well as a fair amount of what I think is Metallica. No EBM though.

Incidentally, when I'm working here, I usually have a MP3 player and headphones with me.

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