Originally Posted by Janszoon

I think the first sentence in your post is a very big assumption. As I said before, for some people variety itself is a defining characteristic of their taste. So, to use the person in your example, what if his answer to the second question was "emotional intensity". If he only says he like hardcore you'e going to read "emotional intensity" as "anger" or something similar, while if he says he likes hardcore and classical you're going to understand that when he says "emotional intensity" he means something much more complex, involving a range of strong emotions. As a result, I think the explanatory power actually increases when people answer the first question with an honest assessment of what they listen to instead of attempting to pare it down to a couple genres.