Excerpt from "Policy Frameworks, Research, and K-12 Schooling"

Targeted marketing is extremely effective. It uses psychological and purchasing-pattern analysis to divide the population into groups likely to make certain decisions. It then targets those groups with messages that reinforce previous beliefs and, if possible, creates barriers through psychological pressure to stay within certain social, style, and consumption boundaries. The result is a society of many lifestyles, each with boundaries carefully drawn and reinforced. these boundaries may be those of the six states Gerzon posited in A House Divided, or they may demarcate other territory. Targeted marketers have far more subdivisions than six. Advancing computer technology has increased the power of this psychological reinforcement tool, but such an approach is profoundly contrary to the traditional goals of music education, which make no distinctions with regard to background, taste, purchasing power and pattern, culture, or talent. The traditional policy goal of music education remains to provide the gift of musical knowledge and skills to all by providing opportunity for serious sequential instruction in the public and private schools.

The conflict between the nature of targeted marketing and the nature of music education can be managed, but not if it is ignored or insufficiently understood. Music education seeks to broaden cultural experience; targeted marketing works to narrow it. Music education wants to bring art from all over the world to everyone. Targeted marketing seeks to use what is known and liked to sell more of the same. Because targeted marketing is so prevalent in support of everything from commercial sales to political ideas, intellectual discourse, and advertising design, the music education field has a significant policy job ahead. Targeted marketing is affecting every person who makes a decision about music education. It has already broken down aspirations for common culture. Targeted marketing positions music as a matter of cultural preference, not a means of knowing and doing that should be available to all. It could be the most anti-diversity influence in American culture today.