The Qualitative Research of Iranian Youth's Tendency to Pop Music

This paper studies music consumption and reception by Iranian youth. In this research, we emphasize on the youth’s tendency to pop music. We assume that music has an important role in everyday lives of Iranian youth and therefore, the youth are the proper audience to study. The theoretical approach used in this study is Stuart Hall’s cultural reception theory. Also, Bourdieu’s innovative concepts in the field of cultural consumption have been used in this study. Our study is limited to Karaj city and the topics of the interviews involve both listening to music and playing an instrument. Our research topic revolves around the fading of some music genres due to a decrease in interest amongst the youth. Moreover, the youth’s consumption of various genres of music can be correlated to their perception and understanding of those genres, and thus we wanted to find out how the youth perceive different types of music.The first result obtained from this study is that music can shape the identity of its youth listeners. Another main observation is that the perception of music is correlated to the life style of its audience, and thus, one piece of music can have plural readings. Moreover, as Peterson states, results have also shown genre diversity in music consumption. Further observations portray an increasing tendency to consume western music in the youth community. However, bipolarity is observed upon further analyzing the reception of music, which illustrates a tendency to retain musical-cultural traditions and identities.