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Abstract
The present study experimentally investigated the impact of lyric language on listener experience and the likelihood for the participant to support the song in the future, to determine if linguistic discrimination occurs in the US popular music industry. Online survey participants (n = 360) were randomly presented one of two versions of the same experimental song (with lyrics in English or lyrics in a non-English language), and asked questions about their listening experience. In addition to two experimental songs, participants were presented with three control songs. The language of the lyrics caused significant differences in listener experience for the first experimental song. The language identity of the participants (monolingual vs. bilingual) was also influential on listener experience measures, but only for the Spanish version of the first experimental song. The likelihood to support the Spanish version of the song by streaming it was significantly lower than for the English version, and this difference was not explained by differences in the other experience variables, demonstrating that linguistic discrimination does occur in US audiences. Finally, the lyric language manipulation in the second experimental song (with English vs. Korean lyric versions) was not successful, so further research that includes different lyric languages and more varied language backgrounds of the participants is needed, in order for the results to be generalizable to non-English languages other than Spanish.