My theory is that the popular music you will end up liking the most as an adult will be the music you hear in your teens; and that you grow less appreciative of popular music as you age into your twenties.
Here’s what I mean: If you look at the year of release of all of the songs on my iPhone, and plot out on a graph how many songs I have that were released in any year, you will see a steady increase that peaks around the year I turned 17, then sharply declines after that.
I was born in 1970. I have maybe two songs in my library that were released that year; 3-4 from 1971, 5 or so from 1972, and so on. Beginning around 1981, when I started getting into adolescence, those numbers increase dramatically. My peak year is probably 1987 - I have probably 200-300 songs from that year.
Then in 1991, two things happened. 1) I turned 21; and 2) Kurt Cobain almost murdered rock & roll. I have probably 25 songs from 1991, and the numbers get steadily smaller throughout the 90’s and beyond.
Note that this only applies to radio-friendly, popular music. Obviously the Reggae, Blues, Jazz, and Classical sections of my library don’t follow this pattern.
Anyway, I’m curious if the experiences of other Dopers, and possibly science, bear this out.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this holds true for a lot of people, but my experience is a bit different. The bulk of my music library is from two time periods: punk and post-punk from about 1978-1982, then stuff from the early-mid-90s onward. I was born in 75, and all the post-punk stuff I came into when I was in my late 20s, so I’m not entirely sure it counts. But Nirvana had the opposite effect on me: it made me interested in rock again at a time I though all the good stuff had already been made before my time.
Not for me. I never paid much attention to “radio-friendly, popular music” in my teens, preferring more obscure groups. I was into Frank Zappa and the Bonzo Dog Band in high school. In college (1970-74), I started liking the blues and Soft Machine and was very much amused to see that Alice Cooper was producing hits. I continued with the New Wave and punk movements and finally started ignoring music in the 80s.
Now, most of my music is from groups from my college years. There are also Broadway showtunes, which I liked as a kid but dropped away from in the late 60s, and classical, which I was exposed to as a kid, but never liked too much back then.
I was born in 1977. While I certainly have an affinity for mainstream music from the 90s when I was in high school, I have a very healthy appreciation for (and large collection of) popular music going back well into the 50s and earlier. I don’t own much past the early 2000s (when I was in my mid-20s); probably only 5% of my overall collection is from later than that, but almost everything before then is roughly equally represented in my music library.
You get busier, but the amount of time in a day remains the same while the monetary requirements needed to support your life dramatically increase. Therefore, you must make decisions - work or play? $ for rent/mortgage or for concerts? T-shirts with bands on it or dress shirts for work?
Many people can (and do) make the decision to stay up-to-date with music. Most others do not… not because because the popular style changed (it really hasn’t, to be honest) but because they no longer have the time nor the disposable income to pursue this interest. So they largely stick with what they know because the cost of acquiring new knowledge is no longer worth it.
For me, at least, that only holds true for pop music itself, and not exactly the way you describe. Like you, I consider pop music pretty much dead after 1990.
But I was born 6 years later than you, so that I actually rejected most of the music played during my teens. My preferences stayed “stuck” in my preteen years - essentially, everything between Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Def Leppard’s Hysteria (1982-1987).
I like a lot of 70’s era rock too. Boston, Foreigner, etc. but I didn’t fully appreciate them until my later teens or twenties.
My current preferences are like you in not being radio-friendly, but I’ve skewed more toward power metal and progressive rock. Bands like Dream Theater and Blind Guardian who are still producing new albums. I actually don’t care so much for vintage heavy metal… the power metal sound that I like best seems to have come into its own in the late 90s or early 00s (though, as always, metal sub-genres are somewhat hard to nail down).
So take my data point as you will… maybe a partial confirmation?
Music requires some effort for you to get to like. In your younger years you have more mental energy and more time, so you will put in the effort more. The music you listen to at that time will typically to a high degree come from the same time period. Thus this period will always feature heavily in the music you listen to.
IF we’re going by actual Top 40 music, then the music I grew up with in the 80s was decent, the 90s just absolutely sucked (but remember none of that grunge stuff featured much on the Top 40), and then things got good again in the 00s, and are relatively okay now. So my adolescent years through my mid-20s are when I disliked popular music the most, and my pre-teens and late 20s onwards are my favorite periods for Top 40 music in terms of when I’ve been alive.
i think you have it half right and half wrong
i tend to listen to music i listened to from age 10 to age 25 or 30
but,i listened to a lot of music that was made before i was born, 1972
so whatever i liked when i was young, i like now
This is me as well. I think the theory is probably more true than not true, but I think a lot of people will have their own story with music.
Man, I honestly can’t think of the last time I sought to listen to a band I listened to my teen years. I grew up with classic country music (that’s what my parents listened to) and now I listen to a lot of that and then a lot of bands or singers I got into in college. I rarely stumble upon a new band and get really into them, but I often find older artists that I connect with.
I think you’re probably right, but it’s always been a weird concept to me that people stop finding new music that they like as they get older. At 34 I find new music that I love all the time, just as much as I did in my teens or my twenties.
If I were to graph it out like you did, I think the numbers would be skewed by all those old CDs (that I haven’t loaded onto my MP3 player) which are just sitting and collecting dust.
The OP’s theory is that you only stop liking new pop music. He himself says that he has found plenty of other new music that he likes, it just doesn’t get radio play on the pop stations.
So I guess the question for you is whether you’re finding this new music on top-40 radio stations, or some other source?
I’m probably more into new music now than I was when I was 18. I find the internet has dramatically helped me get into new genres (it was probably Spotify and Youtube that helped me get into rap & hip hop a few years back… well that and Kanye West).
Not me. I’m 55. I didn’t care very much for pop music when I was growing up, and my music of preference in my teens and twenties was country. That wasn’t the most popular genre here in New York. We only had two country stations, and they were both gone by the early 1990s.
Today I appreciate the pop music of my youth more than I did then, and there are several contemporary performers that I enjoy: Taylor Swift, Sara Bareilles, Maroon 5, Pharrell Williams, Meghan Trainor, etc.
Maybe because I’m a musician myself, but I’ve always been very open to new music and musical styles. My tastes have been cyclical only in the sense that I ran screaming from disco, didn’t take to Euro-pop/electronic music/house music and don’t care for hip hop or rap. Pretty much anything and everything else goes.
I have found the ability to sample on the internet has busted open the musical frontier for me when it comes to new music and styles. I seldom like radio hits and, sadly, live in an area where there is no longer any non-formula radio programming. What I don’t discover by sampling, I hear about as word-of-mouth from other musicians.
Only born a couple years before the OP but I’ve followed a different track.
Breaking down non-calendar (by age with 12-21y.o. being the core that fits the question) decades of the most recent playlist to shuffle play in my car:
1 or younger: 3.1%
2 - 11: 8.7%
12-21: 16.7%
22-31: 23.4%
32-41: 47.6%
nothing made it passed the year I turned 41
I wouldn’t recognize what’s on a top 40 station right now if you forced me to listen to it though. It’s been the same for around a decade. Top 40 stations didn’t really get ear time even when I was young. Popular stuff is probably more balanced since there’s some nostalgia effect and I was more exposed to it when options were more limited.
…and I loved what Cobain did to break down the rigid definitions of what got played on stations. Top 40 suddenly being awash with otherwise non-pop sounds was awesome even if I had to live with the wave of bland sound-alike “Stone Temple of the Pearl Dog Jam” songs for a couple years. Before that maybe The Cars or The Police were the edgy stuff till you got to college radio.
I was 17 in 1982 but the bulk of songs in my album collection and MP3 library fall either well before or well after that year. Most of the stuff I liked to listen to during my adolescence was released either just before I was born or when I was paying more attention to Romper Room and Sesame Street. By the time I really started listening to music (around age 12), I found that I either outright hated or was massively indifferent to most of the music that was then contemporary. In any case, I heard these songs so many times on the radio (and later MTV) that I’m still burnt out on most of them 30 years later.
If you examine my music collection chronologically, you’ll see that most of the songs were released between the mid-60s and the early-70s. After that, there’s a drop-off in songs from the late 70s through the 80s followed by a noticeable upswing for stuff from the early and mid 90s.
I agree with the OP’s theory as a good “general” rule; it makes sense when looking at the general population.
But your statement, “so you will put in the effort more” is also true. I was born in 1966, and turned 14 in 1980, so it’s not surprising that my musical “roots” and taste are based in 1980s music (metal and prog, specifically). But, I have “obsessive” tendencies, and when I get into a band, I really get into them. And, as a musician myself — specifically, a guitarist and now primarily a bassist — when I’ve become “obsessed” with a band I’ve frequently found myself listening to almost nothing else, because I’m determined to learn how to play every single song.
In my specific case, that band was Rush. After all, hearing Geddy Lee play is almost the entire reason I became a bass player. I heard Rush for the first time when I was 14, (specifically, the song “Freewill”) and I had never heard anything like that. It was the coolest thing I had ever heard. Until I heard Rush, I wasn’t even aware that the bass guitar was a distinct instrument. And so … yeah. Years and years of trying to master the bass parts for every Rush song. Sure, I learned how to play most of them, and can even emulate Geddy by singing the lead vocal parts while I play the bass parts.
But, as you might expect, burnout eventually set in, along with frustration over the handful of Rush songs that I simply could not play properly no matter how much time I put into trying. Certain songs were simply beyond my skill level.
I eventually realized that I was no longer playing this music because I enjoyed it. I was playing it because I was obsessed with it. I had reduced the music to a mechanical problem that needed to be solved. That’s when I put my bass into its case and stepped away. I didn’t step away entirely; I continue to play bass at my church on Sunday mornings. I’ve played there with the same core group of musicians for 20 years now. But that was it. No more Monday afternoons at the church (they let me practice there, because my living arrangements are not conducive to loud bass guitar playing, and the whole church staff has Monday off, so the place is empty) with Rush blasting out of my stereo while I jammed and sang along for anywhere between three and six hours. No more putting on the headphones at home and practicing along with Rush CDs.
I decided to focus that effort in a different direction: simply listening to music, and learning to actually enjoy it again. And that has been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. For the last few years, I’ve simply loaded up YouTube and said, “Let’s see what’s out there!” Here I am pushing 50 (I’ll turn 49 in May), and over the last 3-4 years I have discovered so much wonderful music, in so many different genres that I would not have even considered listening to five years ago.
So I can honestly say that the overwhelming bulk of the music I love today is stuff that was released post-2000. I still love Rush, and Judas Priest (so much time spent trying to learn those guitar parts), and Iron Maiden (learning both guitar and bass parts). But I don’t spend much time now on them. I want new stuff that is just as excellent. And I find it.
to break down the rigid definitions of what got played on stations. Top 40 suddenly being awash with otherwise non-pop sounds was awesome even if I had to live with the wave of bland sound-alike “Stone Temple of the Pearl Dog Jam” songs for a couple years. Before that maybe The Cars or The Police were the edgy stuff till you got to college radio.