At what age do our musical memories start being made?
Think back to the one piece of music that transports you outside of space and time, into a memory.
Maybe it’s the first song an old lover dedicated to you. Or, it’s the first musical obsession you held as a young kid. Each individual’s personal soundtrack holds an emotional weight that we may not have the words to explain.
Thankfully, new research has sought to understand how our musical memories are made. A team at the University of South Australia’s Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science has analysed the role that nostalgia-triggering songs play in advertising and brand awareness. In particular, they pinpointed the age of 17 as the peak for listening to new songs that will remain most nostalgic in one’s later years.
The researchers began by consulting several decades-old studies, which showed that age plays a primary factor in predicting music preferences, and that time period is critical to when such preferences first take hold. Then, under their own research, they prioritised relevancy in the era of music streaming, considering that today’s on-demand access to music libraries has expanded the options available to music listeners exponentially.
The experts found that individuals prefer popular music from their mid-to-late teens above all, with music released earlier or later in their lives holding less resonance. Seventeen was deemed the primary year during which music memories are made; in contrast, 35 was pinned as the age at which individuals’ new music discovery declines.
Dr Bill Page, Senior Marketing Scientist at UniSA’s Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, described a survey of 1000 people who listened to snippets of 34 songs selected from the Billboard Top ten charts from 1950 to 2016, noting their preferences on a ten-point scale: “The songs selected were intended to be representative of the year that they were hits, so within the top four to 10, but not the top three songs of the year,” Dr Page explained. “To avoid the influence of outliers, we excluded songs that were so popular that they ‘transcended’ their year of origin – think Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’”
Once the song-specific age (a measure of the individual’s age when each of the 34 songs was featured in the top 100) was taken into account, the calculations indicated that the preference for popular music “peaks at around a period of mid to late adolescence, specifically 16.7-16.8 years of age”.
Associate Professor Carl Driesener stated that the findings are consistent with previous research done at the Institute, defining such as a matter of “replication and extension”: “If we look 20 or 40 years later from the time of audio cassette tapes to music streaming, are we still finding the same effect? When we do find the same thing over and over again, it’s a generalisable pattern and therefore we can have a lot more faith in these results.”
Yet, these findings do slightly differ from earlier research. In the 1980s, an era when compact discs dominated as the main source of music listening, a preference peak of 24 years was indicated. Considering the then cost of physical media, ‘yuppies’ with access to cash flow were more likely to purchase CDs than teenagers with little to no income.
“Given the quantum shifts in music consumption and the increased accessibility of music offered by digitalisation and streaming, a lowering of the peak age is conceivable,” Dr Page confirmed. “An increased exposure to music at a younger age and greater availability to music of all ages could be contributing factors to this shift of preference, but additional research would be required to determine this.”
If you have ever found yourself thinking, “Music isn’t what it used to be”, ask yourself: Do you really believe that? Or is the thought innately within you from a certain age?
Nostalgia is rooted more in the age a person was at that point in time, rather than the specific era itself. Thus, the music that you are exposed to during your most formative years can inspire a heightened sense of longing. Dr Page says: “We do know that memories are formed more easily when there are more emotions going on, or when there are new experiences to be had. In young adulthood, that’s when there are many of these new experiences, of getting to go out into the world and doing things for the first time”.
Concluding, “It may not be the first time someone listens to music, but it could be the first time they choose to listen to music as opposed to hearing it in the car with mum or dad and the radio on.”
