A discrete choice model of consumption of cultural goods: the case of music

In this article we present an empirical analysis of the ‘patterns of cultural choice’ in the musical domain in Italy. The main goal of the article is to verify whether musical tastes in Italy are diversified, with the presence of a group of ‘cultural omnivores’. Our study is based on the theoretical model of the demand for cultural goods proposed by Lévy-Garboua and Montmarquette (1996). In the empirical analysis we simultaneously evaluate the probability of choosing different musical genres. Through the specification of the set of alternatives into three groupings of musical genres —‘‘only classical music’’, ‘‘only popular music’’ and ‘‘all music’’—we were able to detect the relative impact of several socio-economic characteristics on the probability of having ‘‘univorous’’ or ‘‘omnivorous’’ musical likings. In addition, our approach allows us to verify the existence of different patterns of music consumption by testing the significance of differences among the estimated coefficients of the probability functions related to the three groupings of musical genres. We find that age, gender and education are important predictors of an omnivorous taste.