The Glenn Roberts Group performed Feb. 17 before a group of about 100 people in Chicago’s downtown Hyatt Hotel. During the show, there was plenty of free food, drinks and conversation, but only a few guests were engaged in the jazz music.

This scenario occurs throughout the country that gave birth to jazz.

A recent string of studies came out offering insight on the subject of Americans’ weaning interest in the genre.

Greg Geary, a senior music major at the University of Illinois at Chicago and member of the Glenn Roberts Group, said he thought the complexity of jazz makes it difficult to market.

“The industry wants everything to be pinpointed,” he said. “They want to distribute the most simplified music to the most amount of people. Jazz has a wide range of artists and it takes risks that people do not like.”

While there is buzz about a resurgence of jazz, it still is heard less often on popular radio, compared to country and hip-hop music.

“I think any form of music has the potential to reach the level of communication jazz has,” Geary said. “For example, hip-hop has elements of spontaneous composition to it and I would consider any music that has spontaneity to be jazz.”

If the popularity of jazz is on the decline, then a new study shows why this movement is amplified.

Matthew Salganik, a graduate student in sociology at Columbia University in New York, created an experiment with 14,000 people. The instructions were to rate each of the 48 songs by relatively unknown bands. They would first listen to each song, rate them and decide if they wanted to download them. The independent variable was the participant could see how many times each song was downloaded by other people in the experiment. The control group could not see the song’s popularity.

The results showed the participants who could see each song’s popularity tended to give higher ratings to the songs downloaded the most and were more likely to download the same song, suggesting people like music if they think other people also like it.

David Maki, NIU music visiting professor, teaches theory and composition and said music has been pushed into the background for some people.

“In today’s society, music has a different role than it did years ago,” Maki said. “Movies have supplanted music as our common cultural experience, whereas before people would go to musical performances and talk about them more.”

Meanwhile, do basic personality characteristics influence what music you listen to? According to a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the type of music someone might like reversibly predicts that person’s personality.