Does new music discovery really stop in your 30s?
Remember how exciting it used to be when you’d discover a new band or artist? How would you seemingly unearth a new album or song or singer every day, and become a new and better version of yourself each and every time, as a result? When was the last time it happened to you? Six months ago? Two years? Five? Ten? More?
Do you remember when you were genuinely excited to hear a new release or find a new band, or when you actively anticipated new music from otherwise-unheard-of geniuses, instead of stumbling across new albums from your old favourites six months after everyone else has grown bored of them? When you could wow everybody with your wide and varied tastes, and at how ahead of the curve you were, instead of feeling lost in a sea of new releases and artist names you have never heard of and which you can also never seem to commit to memory?
You might be wondering what changed? Where did your spirit of adventure go, and why isn’t any of this new music as good as the old stuff you liked so much in your teenage years? Well, the key to all that is likely to do with your age, rather than with the music. The chances are, you’re just on the other side of being 30 years old.
Ever since the invention of the teenager (1944, to be precise), trends in popular culture have been shaped and driven by young people. Whether those young people came in the form of the screaming and rioting Bobby Soxers who were more than swooning for Sinatra’s crooning, the hoards of fans electrified by Elvis ten years later or the Beatlemaniacs of the 1960s, teens have been the main drivers of popular music. In the background of all those cultural shifts, though, is the image of the over-the-hill adults who just don’t get what’s going on. Who wished the kids would give up on the nonsense of Rock and Roll and get into some serious music, like the Nature Boy Nat ‘King’ Cole, or else, swing with Bing or get in tune with some Broadway cast recordings?
And it seems that even though the way that we listen to music has changed now, the way we feel about it hasn’t moved on all that much. A recent New York Times analysis of Spotify data revealed that the majority of our most listened to songs will be things that we discovered when we were in our early teens, with the peak age of influence on our tastes at 13 for girls and 14 for boys.
And while the New York Times pinpointed the early teens as the critical time for taste development, studies of listener data by the European streaming platform Deezer pinpointed another number, which proved pivotal in shaping our tastes going forward. According to their analysis, our sense of adventure starts to go into decline around ten years later, at age 24. Sure, we can still mix it up most of the time, but we are increasingly reaching for the same select songs over and over again by now. Their data goes on to suggest that 31 is the age where true experimentation with your taste has pretty much come to an end, while elsewhere, another online study has suggested that 33 may be a more accurate figure to indicate when our tastes become a cultural cul-de-sac.
Of course, there will also be plenty of cultural, environmental and geographical factors that go into moulding our tastes early on, but one thing is pretty consistent regardless of who is analysing the data. As we age, we spend less time looking for new music and more time returning to the safety of what we already know. Perhaps, as our backs begin to ache and we have to make that horrible noise every time we get up off the sofa, it’s nice to have an occasional reminder of how it felt to be young in the form of our favourite songs. Perhaps, though, there are other factors at play which better explain what is going on.
One key area where the numbers move at different speeds is the listening habits of parents, when compared with non-parents. Those with newborns to look after understandably have less time to think about the next musical artists on the scene, and so naturally spend less time exploring the latest trends. Remaining child-free doesn’t guarantee you a lifetime of new discoveries, but it does prolong your eventual stagnation by a few years. Other explanations given as to why we find it harder to find new music, according to a Deezer survey, included having a demanding job (16% of responders) and being overwhelmed by the amount of choice available (19%).
And where is there more choice than on your streaming platform of choice? A key factor that can explain why we’re all slipping into a cultural malaise when it comes to new discoveries is the increasing reliance on streaming platforms and their artificial curatorial efforts and algorithms. There is plenty going on behind the scenes, which can explain why you can so easily end up listening to the same 20 songs on repeat, chief among them, the On Repeat playlist, which just regurgitates back to you all the songs you evidently already know.
Then, of course, there is the behind-the-scenes lobbying from major labels and promo teams to push the latest releases from their major artists to the masses, paying for spots on playlists that the newest, up-and-coming talents simply can’t afford. Another way in which streaming is killing our already-waning interest in new music is by killing our engagement with music altogether.
It may seem antithetical to their reason for being, but streaming platforms like Spotify devalue the experience of listening to music so much that it is relegated in most people’s experience to becoming nothing more than a background soundscape to cover up the silence while their attention is elsewhere. This is key to the streaming platform business model, so that you can keep their product open and running at all times without having to engage too much with it.
Since the middle of the last decade, Spotify’s algorithms have developed to encourage so-called ‘passive listening’, and it’s hard to make any groundbreaking discoveries when you’re only engaging with something passively. One reason for this change is so that they can flood their so-called ‘curated’ playlists with songs they have their own financial stake in, but which you’d otherwise never choose to listen to at all. Lately, there has been a slew of AI-generated ‘music’ flooding the streaming platforms, and before that, it came in the form of songs thrown together by writers for hire who had been bought out and will never receive a penny in royalties.
The best way to fight back against these nefarious practices is by taking an active interest in your musical tastes again. Remember how exciting it used to be when you’d discover a new band or artist? How you’d seemingly unearth a new album or song or singer each and every day, and become a new and better version of yourself each and every time, as a result? You don’t need to stop. There are still incredible artists and bands out there, coming up with exciting new sounds and speaking to the turbulent times we find ourselves in. We not only owe it to all those artists putting themselves out there to go and listen, but we owe it to ourselves, too.
Isn’t it more exciting to think that you still haven’t heard your favourite song of all time yet, or your favourite ever singer, than to think that your best years of listening are behind you? Let’s all turn off our On Repeat playlists and go out and find something new for ourselves today.
