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What Happens To Our Musical Taste As We Age?
An anonymous reader writes: New research from Spotify and Echo Nest reveals that people start off listening to chart-topping pop music and branch off into all kinds of territory in their teens and early 20s, before their musical tastes start to calcify and become more rigid by their mid-30s. "Men, it turns out, give up popular music much more quickly than women. Men and women have similar musical listening tendencies through their teens, but men start shunning mainstream artists much sooner than women and to a greater degree."
pop music is 'given up' because it targets a demographic of youth as a branding and marketing driver. Bieber sells the idea of manufactured sex appeal to young women, while angsty pop rock sells the idea of rebellion and individuality through consumption to boys. LMFAO and Pitbull are just clever branded advertising for premium alcoholic spirits and luxury apparel/vehicles. They set a standard outside of childhood that no self-respecting adult would entertain.
30somethings are a very difficult democraphic to market anything to. Pop themes like true love, freedom, rebellion, and partying fall on the deaf ears of millenials who've seen systemic police corruption and racism as a tool of an increasingly totalitarian state basically wipe the concepts out. Miley Cyrus' magical transformation into some glam rocker didnt shock us because we didnt grow up caring about the moral majority and conservative culture war dogma.
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As a kid born in the early 1980s, I mostly listened to pop.
In the mid-1990s I started listening to mostly what would then be called "alternative rock".
In the mid-2000s, I switched to mostly pop.
In the 2010s, I'm listening to mostly pop and dance music, with a lot of EDM, and some hip-hop. My musical tastes are wider than ever.
As I post this I'm listening to the last song added to my music library Ariana Grande's "One Last Time".
I realize this analysis is about "popular" music, so this may not entirely fit. But last year I listened to one of those Great Courses sets on "How to Listen to and Understand Great Music" and really changed what I've been listening to, which now includes quite a bit of concert music (baroque, classical, etc.) that I never really appreciated before. Am I an outlier that I'm picking up something new just as I turn 40, or does this not count because it's not pop music, and old fogies are supposed to drift into listening to this ancient stuff anyway?
I'd say I've also picked up a lot of new material recently because of Pandora, but I'll admit most of that is older music, where it's a genre/style I liked, but I somehow missed some of the artists from that era who are similar to ones I already liked.
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I don't think it's that either, at least not exclusively.
When we're young we have no frame of reference for life. We roll with whatever life throws at us because there's no preconceived notion of what life is. Even into early adulthood we're still learning what life entails, but by the time we reach our thirties we usually have enough notion of life that we start to seek to stabilize it.
I think that with music there's a distinct difference between what is good, what is popular, and what is both good and popular. When one looks at top-40 and top-100 lists from the past, one can see music that topped the charts when it was new that's not popular today right along with music that is still played. There's a lot of music that isn't played anymore that was popular; I'm sure the same will be said of music made today. We might well find that Taylor Swift becomes the next Linda Rhonstadt, almost completely disappearing from popular culture despite having made quite the splash for many years. By contrast, we might find Amy Winehouse being looked at as the next Janis Joplin twenty to thirty years from now.
Another side is the following of short term trends or fads versus following long term trends. If the buying public trends away from autotone and other heavy post-production techniques, there will be a decade of music that falls into a catergory similar to how 'eighties' defines a genre whose constituent parts don't necessarly otherwise have a lot in common. We may look back on this era's music and those who continue to listen to it with the same mirth as we look at fans of groups like KC and the Sunshine Band.
I still listen to new music. Some of it's good, some of it's crap. I also listen to older music that I didn't know about when it was new. Life would be kind of dull if I was stuck on bands from the late eighties and nineties; I can only take so much Hootie and the Blowfish.
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I'm in my 50s, but I can say that my tastes have not narrowed but certainly become more demanding. I want more complexity in my music, and a greater attention to detail. Maybe as the article points out its partially boredom from the "I've heard it all before", but I have some relatively recent albums that I enjoy just as much or more than my younger year classics. There is great musical talent out there and I like new stuff. There are many obscure albums from the past that the pop world completely missed, and it is fun to discover them.
It takes harder work to find what I like, and I don't have as much time to devote. I am lucky to see a live show more than a few a year, even though I keep vowing to do better.
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