Music

This study pinpoints when exactly people stop caring about new music

by Mark Teo

Ever thought about when, as music listeners, people stop engaging with new—and popular—music? We certainly have: As we’ve gotten older, we’ve seen plenty of our friends, who were once passionate new-music junkies, revert back to the music of their youth. When you notice it, it almost becomes obnoxious—there’s little worse than a 30-year-old pining for the music of yore, stating that music was “much better back then.”

A new study conducted by streaming-music giant Spotify, then, has sought to quantify when—and how—people start turning away from new music. And they’ve found a stark progression in musical taste: As teenagers, it found, we’re heavily invested in mainstream—that is, charting—music. We begin to drift away from the pop charts and develop our personal tastes until the age of 25.

And at age 25, things begin to flatten out. As Spotify puts it, we begin to be less interested in the music. We’re interested in listening to our music. And our musical tastes tend to already be formed. Check the progression of musical tastes by age below.

Of course, musical taste doesn’t stop evolving at 25. It continues to budge, ever slowly, up until age 35, when it levels off. (This might simply be an age where people simply stop being interested in investing time in music.) Funnily enough, by age 42, listeners become slightly more interested in mainstream music—this may be due to the fact that by their 40s, people are listening to the music of their kids.

Check the entire results of the study here.