Watching the Billboard Music Awards (barely) with the sound almost off most of the time, I realized one more time the obvious,… appearance matters so much in this mainstream business. None of these performances interested me whatsoever, but all these people were immaculate from head to toe as usual, looking like gods and goddesses, with high couture, perfect manicure, amazing make-up, six-pack-abs for guys, high boobs for girls,… who are those aliens?
We live in a terrible society where appearance matters more than ever. Does this surprise you? No of course, but this was confirmed by a serious study in the prestigious scientific magazine Nature, ‘Musicians’ appearances matter more than their sound’, the more surprising in the story is that Nature even cared enough to publish an article about this. According to this study from last year, ‘people’s judgments about the quality of a musical performance are influenced more by what they see than by what they hear.’
Social psychologist Chia-Jung Tsay of University College London, who published his findings in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, presented recordings of the three finalists in each of ten prestigious international competitions to participants and asked them to guess the winner. ‘With just sound, or sound and video, novices and experts both guessed right at about the same level as chance (33% of the time), or a little less. But with silent video alone, the success rate for both was about 46–53%. The experts did no better than the novices.’ And this tells a lot! They were guessing the winners at a much better level, just looking at the appearance of the candidates. I knew it already, but it saddens me, and this explains why we are polluted by so many good-looking starlets and fashion plates.
‘As a classical musician, I was initially somewhat disturbed by the findings’, said Tsay, ‘It was surprising to find that there is such a wide gap between what we believe matters in the evaluation of music performance and what is actually being used to judge performances.’
And this not the only study of the kind, according to this article in Psychology Today, ‘over the last 15 years, an assortment of studies has shown that people tend to rate musical quality higher for performers who are judged to be physically attractive, as compared to those not judged as such (North & Hargreaves, 1997; Ryan et al., 2004; 2006; Wapnick et al., 1997, 1998, 2000, 2009).’ And the most compelling part is that the quality of their music or their sound is rated higher, and this by highly trained musical evaluators!! Everyone is highly bias when it comes to beauty and appearance.
It is not difficult to realize that mainstream pop music is all about appearance and sexiness with very little substance, so these studies demonstrate the obvious, appearance matters, yeah what’s new? But it is especially true now with the overdose of music coverage by all sorts of media, musicians have never been so visible, and they are even on TV when they are dead. But doesn’t this apply mostly to worthless mainstream music? It doesn’t seem to be the case for interesting and innovative musicians, otherwise how would you explain the success of Ric Ocasek, Marilyn Manson, Lyle Lovett, or Shane Macgowan? However, I couldn’t find many ugly female performers and there is a reason why, we are obviously much more bias with female performers’ appearance… And this is even more a reality today, can you imagine Janis Joplin, Cass Elliot, Patti Smith having the same career today? Sure we had Susan Boyle but where is she now? And Adele lost all the weight!
The proof that appearance is everything was that performance by the Michael Jackson hologram during the Billboard Music Awards, people did a standing ovation to… what exactly? To the idea of someone who does not exist anymore? To the perfect appearance of a ghost.
