I’ve always been drawn to the music of previous eras.
As a kid, I loved going through my parents’ vinyl and putting on some dusty record from the stack I’d never heard before.
When I was a teenager I noticed their collection of cool old records had a cutoff point. Sometime in their late-20s they’d apparently stopped buying what I considered to be ‘still relevant’ records.
Their vinyl purchases after that point had been… suspect (in the eyes of a teenaged know-it-all).
Then I’d be blasting something raucous from the 70’s or 80’s in my room, and my mom would ask me to turn it down. “But mommmmm,” I’d whine, “This should be YOUR music! Why don’t you know _____ (any number of bands who I’d assumed were ubiquitous when my parents were in their 20s and 30s)?”
“We had you,” she said.
It seemed unforgivable. No excuses for listening to bland music!
Now a few years into parenthood myself, I GET IT. Gone are the endless hours of musical investigation. The easiest thing (maybe even the natural thing) would be to let your tastes settle, and just kinda cozily listen to the same old stuff for the rest of your life.
But this musical settling isn’t an experience unique to parenthood (though it seems to happen a few years earlier, on average, with parents).
According to Ajay Kalia’s article “Music was better back then: When do we stop keeping up with popular music?” the average listener goes through “taste freeze” in their mid-30s. Using data from Spotify and Echo Nest, Ajay takes a look at how listening habits change with age, what factors influence or precipitate those changes, and how this “maturing” of taste is accelerated in parents.
It’s a really fascinating read and provides some convincing evidence for its argument. That being said, I have …Read the full story
Source:: The DIY Musician