Women and music consumption; Typology of women's musical taste

Women are one of the active audiences of music consumption and music is always present in their everyday life experiences. The present study tries to answer the main question that what is the musical taste of women? And what typology of women's musical tastes can be formulated? This question has been done by qualitative research method. The data collection tool is semi-structured interviews with 28 women with different levels of education, social status, and age groups in Tehran, which have been selected by purposive sampling and theoretical sampling that are common in qualitative research. The results narrate that women are heterogeneous and this heterogeneity is also seen in their musical taste. Women in music consumption are seen as a random and scattered audience, leisure-seeker audience to identity-seeker audience, protest audience, skilled audience, and semantic audience. Women don't have a single musical taste, but their tastes are different based on their individual and social backgrounds; this means that the musical taste is social and it depends on social and cultural backgrounds. At the same time, due to the variety of musical functions in everyday life, women's musical taste moving towards integration and combination (Combined consumption of elite and popular music). Also, in the musical consumption of women, the functional aspects of music dominance on the aesthetic and semantic aspects.