Good article! I think I kept going a bit beyond 31, there are artists I discovered later I still listen to.

But there's definitely something that happens. Even when I seek out new music, I listen to it and enjoy it while it's on, but when the song's over it's gone. I don't really get a tune stuck in my head unless I heard it before I was 40.

Oh well, time to rationalize, I'm going to join the other old farts and just declare that any music made after I was an adult just objectively sucks...
posted by TheophileEscargot at 2:23 AM on April 26 [11 favorites]

I think I'm confused by this "Spotify data indicates that parents stray from the mainstream at an accelerated rate compared to empty nesters—a sort of "parent tax" on one's cultural relevancy." Seriously, my kids are the only place I get new music from. I would be way more out of touch if they didn't keep me hostage in the car and force me to listen to things.
posted by corb at 2:27 AM on April 26 [28 favorites]

It’s an interesting thesis, but using data from Spotify to say that people stop liking new music and want to hear the same thing is like asking Henry Ford what colour cars should be. Spotify - and streaming music in general - encourages you to consume without questioning. That makes it harder to enjoy classical or jazz music, or even more obtuse forms of popular music. When Apple Music released their app for streaming classical music they did what was, essentially, a nine-part historical overview podcast about what classical music is, which is worth checking out.
posted by The River Ivel at 2:30 AM on April 26 [40 favorites]

This is funny because I have the opposite of nostalgia — hearing music from my adolescence makes me super uncomfortable. Not sure if it is a one foot in the grave kind of thing (I do have that; I deeply dislike going through old stuff and being reminded of my past; unhappily for me I’ve spent the week helping my mother downsize) or if it’s just that nineties music sucked a lot, because that’s also true. Overdetermined!

Most of the music I listen to now is kind of old, but the pop music in it dates from a decade or two past that period. I have discovered a taste for some new-to-me stuff in the last few years, although my ability to catalog it mentally is much weaker, so I’m not as able to name artists and pieces so readily. My husband’s love for minimalists rubbed off on me, that was new. In general I listen to a lot of music without words during the workday and that tends to be Pandora stations keyed off of artists I learned about within the past decade: Steve Reich, but also David Grier (bluegrass) and Ratatat (electro rock? idk).
posted by eirias at 2:41 AM on April 26 [15 favorites]

I have Bjork's Post playing at the moment, which I first heard and had blow my mind in high school, so I get it, but really? Some really important friendships still sit on the bedrock of talking about what music we're into at the moment and I'm 45.
posted by deadwax at 3:17 AM on April 26 [8 favorites]

My formative music was late 80's music. And radio was the main way of listening to it, along with the few CDs I could afford. As a result I heard SO MANY 80s alternative-radio songs SO MANY TIMES that I got sick of them and refused to listen to them for about 30 years. Now I've started occasionally enjoying an 80s song.

As a musician and dance music aficionado I've always found new music, although I'll admit it's a slower process now. Most of what I listen to now in my 50s are songs I discovered in the last 10 years. (Check out Glass Beams!)
posted by mmoncur at 3:23 AM on April 26 [6 favorites]

I used to stay up to date on new music. I put a lot of time and effort into music discovery. Now, in my early 40s, I just don't have time to keep up. And I no longer have a job where I can pop my headphones on and listen to John in the Morning on KEXP for a few hours every day.

Every year when all the "best of the year" lists come out I have a mini crisis where I feel like I have to go and catch up with all. This year it's been a bit better because I've been making time to listen to new music lists on Apple Music, and I have found some new bands that I really love.

But what's really helped is listening to those lists instead of just flipping on the radio in the car. Now maybe I am going to sound like a confused old fart, but I can't with the radio any more. It's all the same. You hear a song on one station, change it, and the song comes up on the other station. And there's little variety between songs. (And let's not even start with annoying DJs. Is there anyone who actually likes all that chatter during morning "drive time"?)
posted by synecdoche at 3:42 AM on April 26 [12 favorites]

My intuition would be that we stop finding new music when it turns out our media are no longer supported and we'd have to start over from scratch in a new format, again. But now I'm off to find a better answer in the article.
posted by Ashenmote at 3:43 AM on April 26 [13 favorites]

I'm in my 40s and still finding new music thanks to listening to radio rather than streaming services. I discovered the Radio Garden app years ago and found enough (mostly college/indie/public) stations playing good new-to-me music that I revived a habit of my youth and started carrying a pocket notebook to write down the names of songs I heard.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 3:46 AM on April 26 [10 favorites]

I’m 43 and I have discovered a wide variety of music at every phase of my life. Some of my favorite music is still from my teens, and I listen to it; I also listen to music from my parents’ generation, and I listen to music from my 20s, 30s, and 40s. Modern streaming has really put this in overdrive for me. I can find a genre like Afrobeats, throw on a playlist or two, and wind up with completely new songs that I enjoy. Sure if I feel like it I can listen to music from when I was 13 but I love variety and discovery just as much as I ever did. I hope I’m still exploring in my 80s.
posted by graymouser at 3:51 AM on April 26 [19 favorites]

I may be a mutant, but I'm in my 60s and still find amazing new music.

Which isn't to say the article is wrong. When I do look up old music on Youtube, there is inevitably someone saying "They don't make music this good any more." But they do, they really do.

It's not that hard to find. Hey, Mefi is one source. Also jwz's playlists.
posted by zompist at 4:21 AM on April 26 [22 favorites]

I'm 59, still finding new things to enjoy.
2017, Loudhailer Auricula Suite
2019, Sleaford Mods TCR Jolly Foocker
2021, Lone Lady Former Things, elegiac, into phenomenogy.
recently
Benefits, sweary, angry, eloquent.
Bob Vylan, sweary, angry, and gentle.
Baxter Dury – Trellic

Finding either on twitter, or searching UK postcodes to find musicians who assiciste with places I want to know more about. I don't subscribe to anything
posted by unearthed at 4:24 AM on April 26 [6 favorites]

My kid is 3 so I get new songs stuck in my head all the time. They probably feature more dinosaurs and trucks than the music I used to listen to though.
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 4:33 AM on April 26 [17 favorites]

finding new (to you) music is so much easier now, even if some of the "new" music is old music you never heard before. play song radio for a song you like. hear a song you don't know and like a lot. listen to the album or song radio that song or listen to other music by that artist. I've come across so much new to me music that way.

nothing is ever going to hit like whatever we latched onto when we first started loving music, but it's still possible to keep things fresh.
posted by kokaku at 4:36 AM on April 26 [7 favorites]

I undeniably have a strong emotional response to my favorite music from my adolescence and am affected by the age-linked trends of less time to discover music and less encountering music in public. But I've found plenty of new music in recent years, including new genres, new artists working in genres I like, and older music I wasn't exposed to by the mainstream when I was younger. I'm sure I'd register as well off the mainstream, but based on my personal experience, I don't know how much weight I want to give that measure alone as an indicator of not encountering new music, especially since the advent of the internet.
posted by EvaDestruction at 4:37 AM on April 26 [4 favorites]

I will say that Tidal has a more interesting song radio than Spotify did. Spotify seemed insistent on finding its way back to 80s music or classic rock no matter where I started. i always wanted it to have a setting to prioritize novelty. why only play the top track on an album when deeper cuts are often excellent? it's not like you're a radio station with an established playlist.

also fuck Spotify for their Joe Rogan support.
posted by kokaku at 4:39 AM on April 26 [13 favorites]

This is another case of "population averages don't tell you anything about individuals" statistics.

One thing hasn't changed: radial graphs continue to be a terrible way to show information.
posted by AlSweigart at 4:40 AM on April 26 [8 favorites]

Also, all this data is based on Spotify and other streaming services. The data they have isn't neutral and heavily biased by the service. These conclusions are the algorithm tail wagging the dog.
posted by AlSweigart at 4:42 AM on April 26 [23 favorites]

Another mutant here, but I live in a city of live music. There are three radio stations that are programmed 100% by hundreds of DJs,, plus a justice radio station that is mostly talk, but also has music.

I play a catchy tune for my kid a couple times if I like it, then if they like it we can sing it together

Honestly most music is played from YouTube nowadays, but I still have the record player and CD player out all the time
posted by eustatic at 4:45 AM on April 26 [4 favorites]

I fell into this kind of trap for many years. Then I got streaming music for the first time after buying a new phone, and plenty of time and anxiety with the pandemic. I started finding great bands that I somehow missed, like Radiohead. And I developed a taste for new pop and rock sounds that have stuck. I turn 52 next month and I still listen to a mix of stuff from college, high school, and earlier, but also a lot of newer stuff now. boygenius is as good or better than anything I was listening to at 13.
posted by rikschell at 4:47 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

I didn't set out to find new music but through one recommendation on the blue (Hi Ren) it has opened a massive array of avenues to follow via artists related to Ren or collaborators or influences.

There's such a wide array of creative artists out there mixing and bending genres that it reminds me of my youth when we broke free from formulaic music standards. Then the pendulum swung back to formulaic radio play and music exploration has moved to recommendations (much like the former use of mix tapes.)

Spotify is a good tool for listening yet they pay so little to the artists. But it does offer a decent snapshot of who is using the tool and what genres they play.
posted by mightshould at 4:47 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

Also, this sounds like a report on Spotify's editorial choices, rather than what people listen to on Spotify, no?
posted by eustatic at 4:47 AM on April 26 [9 favorites]

I feel like I'm being pulled in two ways on this at the moment, because I'm now old enough (mid-30s) that my teenage years were twenty years ago, and listening to bands I loved then hits different now. I got kind of embarrassed by some of my teenage taste when I was in my 20s, and I've been actively trying to correct for that lately - I recently got really into all the new-ish Bright Eyes companion EPs, having gone through a phase maybe ten years ago of refusing to listen to Bright Eyes at all even though those records helped me survive my massively shitty adolescence.

At the same time, I'm trying to at least introduce myself to some newer stuff (and also new-to-me stuff). My sister finally got me to listen to boygenius and I'm digging, despite having avoided anything in the Phoebe Bridgers orbit for a long time after I saw her as a support act in 2014 and really bounced off what she was doing at that time. I started listening to Ethel Cain this morning since she's playing at a festival I'm going to in June and I wanted at least some familiarity with her music. I set myself a goal during a trip last November to get into Peter Gabriel, and that's been very rewarding, despite Peter Gabriel not really counting as 'new' music (though I know he put out a new album recently).

I'm not always good at trying, I'm a creature of autistic inertia and I usually just want to overplay the stuff I already love until I get sick of it, but right now I'm aware that I am in fact in a phase of trying to be interested in new-to-me music and I hope to roll with it while it lasts.

If anyone's looking for something new to enjoy, and you like Weyes Blood type stuff, I strongly recommend Allie Crow Buckley's record from last year, Utopian Fantasy. Which I only know about because I'm still interested in Saddle Creek-adjacent folks, and it was co-produced by Jason Boesel, formerly of Rilo Kiley.
posted by terretu at 4:50 AM on April 26 [3 favorites]

oh and a plug for Ask Metafilter threads about "what bands/songs are like X?" so much new music discovered thaf way.
posted by kokaku at 4:52 AM on April 26 [10 favorites]

What on earth is this article talking about? It seems to conflate genre with overall music--it uses data to suggest that our taste in styles and genres of music get settled in pretty early on, but then there's a lot of wailing about still listening to individual artists, and that's not the same argument at all. I'm not sure how anyone could use Spotify and not be exposed to new artists performing within your chosen genres. (Doesn't anyone ever click on the Discover Weekly playlist?!?)

Maybe I'm an outlier here, but while I deeply love the music I 'discovered' (or, rather, that was foisted on me by some 80s and 90s DJs and MTV) in my youth, I don't feel any need to rush to those particular songs over and over, any more than I need to watch, I dunno, Mork or Perfect Strangers or something over and over. There's a whole world out there and it's moving forward all the time, more music you could ever listen to in a thousand lifetimes, and some of it is so good, why would you want to miss out on finding something new? And yes, the music I listen to now, you could construct a sort of lineage between it and what I liked in the 80s (gay people with synthesizers, apparently), but those genres have stretched and evolved over the years.

Maybe it's just taking a lesson from my parents, whose tastes absolutely ossified, to the point of only listening to the oldies station with its endless decerebrated beach music, but I can't do that. Let's just sweep fifty years of musical evolution off the board! Agh! It makes my aging bones hurt!
posted by mittens at 4:55 AM on April 26 [6 favorites]

Here s something that works well: for any of your video chat meetings for work, have an icebreaker where everyone posts a youtube link to their favorite song of the moment

By the end of the terrible work meeting, you have a playlist!! You can even pick one by dice roll to play back to everyone to sign out of the meeting! Super productive!
posted by eustatic at 4:59 AM on April 26 [9 favorites]

This is me and not me. My gigantic serotonin playlist on my Plex server is probably about 75% stuff I've loved since I was a teen/20s, but the rest of it is music I've found or heard about in other ways. I don't use streaming music services, I don't listen to the radio (unless it's a campus/community radio station), and I don't really seek out info about new artists on purpose. Shepherd is amazingly good at finding new stuff and he knows what I like, so if he hears a band or artist he thinks is in my wheelhouse (he teases me for loving music in a minor key), he lets me know.

Frankly, one of the surest ways I think anyone in their late 30s/40s stays au courant is if you have kids. My youngest sister has two teenagers so she knows more about what's new than I ever could!
posted by Kitteh at 5:07 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

YouTube (and maybe ADHD) has kept me going at 41. Having discovered Nobonoko just last week. (Chip tune... Something)

But its certainly not the intense ride of my teenage years where it felt every new band was intense and i would devour it wildly

Was giggling at thought I had recently. teen me: man. Soft jazz sucks. I wonder why adults listen to it.
40 year old me: heck yeah, Kenny G time for the dishes!
posted by AngelWuff at 5:07 AM on April 26 [5 favorites]

I have typical GenX opinions about the best era for pop and rock. There's a bit of good stuff from the 60s, a bit more from the 70s, most of the gold is from the 80s, some of grunge and industrial rock was pretty great in the 90s, and only a handful of bangers since then.

Thing is though, in my childhood I was obsessed with my dad's Isao Tomita and Wendy Carlos 8-tracks, with Pink Floyd close behind. I was into classical and then also jazz when I was 16 when everyone around me was listening to Van Halen or Huey Lewis. I was never much of a voluntary radio listener even as a teen, except to the college radio station that had eclectic non-mainstream programming.

As a 52-year-old I still do like the occasional 80s pop but my tastes run more to electronic stuff without vocals (especially Berlin School and dark ambient), and a smattering of other stuff (taiko, bluegrass, bellydance, symphonic metal, movie scores, baroque music, goth rock that I never listened to when it was new...)

I do 0% of my music listening on Spotify. Most of my collection comes from Bandcamp, recent releases from independent artists.
posted by Foosnark at 5:13 AM on April 26 [7 favorites]

Putting a stats hat on, if what the article posits is a real phenomenon, it s likely related to when people get entrained into the rat race of full time employment, often related to kids. but don't blame the kids, the kids want you to be at least a little cool, even if sometimes they want you to do that away from them somewhere. Music is often intergenerational when much else of consumer culture is "generationally" programmed by marketers

I would posit that loss of musical curiosity is related to overwork

So in conclusion, abolish capitalism and listen to new music all day
posted by eustatic at 5:20 AM on April 26 [13 favorites]

Can confirm that small kids kill your ability to discover music. "Put on my headphones and listen to a jam while I do whatever" stops being an option. And yeah, once you have been through the cycle of "this artist is amazing!" a few dozen times, it stops being as obsessive. You can't get the intensity of your teenage years back. You can't revirginize your tastes.

That said nothing quite lights a fire under my ass to find new music than the repeated experience of thinking of a song from my youth, looking it up on youtube, and having the first dozen comments be along the lines of "My sister passed away last week, and this was her favorite track" and "We bopped to this at my uncle's funeral, and it was like he was there. RIP Greg". On a fucking Prodigy track.
posted by phooky at 5:26 AM on April 26 [8 favorites]

Some suggestions for those just seeking out music not in English : Angola, Cabo Verde, Zouk from Guadeloupe & Martinique as well as other beguine, chouval bwa (wooden horse or Carnaval music), cumbia, classic Cuban big band (pre Castro), South African, SOCA et al.
posted by DJZouke at 5:27 AM on April 26 [7 favorites]

Spotify for most people is sonic wallpaper, no? So of course most users will skew towards comfort and the familiar, especially choice of genres.

But it's just about indisputable that the music you 'grow' with in your teens and 20s remains evocative (with both good and bad associations). We have our best of 80s and 90s collections that come out at parties, especially dance music. My wife is transported back to her 20s, when she'd dance til sunrise at after-hours clubs.

When I was in my 40s and 50s, I was at internet companies and working with people 15 to 25 yrs younger than me, so there were awesome playlists to dip into. That's when I discovered Bjork's "Post"!

Nowadays we've drifted more towards jazz, but I still like encountering new music, like on CBC Music's late night shows.
posted by Artful Codger at 5:28 AM on April 26 [4 favorites]

also Radio Free Fedi is good; if you have recs for other creator-centric streams please post them
posted by phooky at 5:28 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

Spotify stats notwithstanding, it appears as if self-reported openness to new musical experience is alive and well in Metafilter-land.
posted by kozad at 5:38 AM on April 26 [8 favorites]

But it's just about indisputable that the music you 'grow' with in your teens and 20s remains evocative (with both good and bad associations).

I think I do dispute this! Unless “cringe/eyeroll” counts as evocative, but I feel like that’s stretching the term a bit. It’s like meeting up with an ex after many years and having this feeling, jeez, I made all this fuss over you?
posted by eirias at 5:42 AM on April 26 [4 favorites]

Oh, forgot that within Brasil there is another universe of music. ANGOLA!
posted by DJZouke at 5:54 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

Seriously, my kids are the only place I get new music from. I would be way more out of touch if they didn't keep me hostage in the car and force me to listen to things.

That seems to be life with teenage kids, but I think they're talking about the toddler through rugrat years when they were still holding you hostage in the car and forcing you to listen to things but it was "The Wheels On The Bus" or "Let It Go" over and over.

And yeah, once you have been through the cycle of "this artist is amazing!" a few dozen times, it stops being as obsessive.

I was going to say something like this... by your 30s you'll have "figured out" or at least wandered into some genres you enjoy and others you don't. But there's just not much difference between a $genre song recorded this year and one recorded in 2010 and released this year and one that was released in 2004 and you never noticed, so why go out of your way to look for recently-recorded music? It's not really going to be very different from what you were listening to last year.

The one thing I've noticed about myself anyway is that aging into my 50s and accepting being old and uncool is that I'm more willing to give stuff I didn't like back in the day (or at least would have said I didn't like) a second chance. Old country, disco shit, boney m ridiculousness.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 5:56 AM on April 26 [6 favorites]

I keep a list of favorites, all culled from YouTube. Probably needs to be combed for web-rot one of these days...
posted by jim in austin at 6:08 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

Another thing is that they seem to be comparing to popular music -- one of the things they note is that past your 30s people seem to stop caring what's #1.

But... that kind of actually-popular music seems to have really stagnated? Since the 1980s there was a big pulse of change as hiphop influences moved in as far as they were going to and... that's it? Just listening to snippets of the songs in the current top 40, I don't hear anything that would have been out of place in eh 1998 or so?

One thing I do like about The Kids These Days is lots of them seem to draw a line between The Stuff Right Now and a great big mush of Everything Else. Johnny Cash = Nirvana = Beatles = Kiss, all of it equally worth a try.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 6:11 AM on April 26 [4 favorites]

so why go out of your way to look for recently-recorded music?

That's a good question. For me, it's:
- supporting active artists instead of feeding zombie catalogs
- keeping my brain surprised as i lose neuroplasticity
- maintaining a sense of connection with a changing world

Music reflects the hopes and fears of the society around it, and that's not static. I'm getting old, but I don't want to live in the past, and it's one of my ways of engaging with the present.
posted by phooky at 6:12 AM on April 26 [11 favorites]

I survived the toddler years without hearing horrible kids music by simply refusing to play horrible kids music. The tadpole listened to whatever we were playing or what was on the radio. This is what my parents did to me, and the end result was that I love a whole lot of stuff that was in their record collection (and made off with several of said records when I moved out).

Had a friend who was telling me that she found some “cool music for kids, where kids re-record rock songs so you can play kid-friendly Beatles or Van Halen covers for your kid” and I was like … you can’t just play the Beatles or Van Halen? I mean I drew the line at playing Public Enemy for the kid, uncensored, but otherwise he got whatever I felt like hearing.

Having a really good radio station is also key to discovery of new music. A station run by humans, with human DJs, who live in your general vicinity and are aware of both current national and global trends as well as the local music scene. Our local public radio station has a stream, so when I’m out of broadcast area I switch to streaming the same channel.
posted by caution live frogs at 6:17 AM on April 26 [9 favorites]

The biggest reasons why I don't keep up with new music very well:

1. Can't ignore lyrics or even really complicated musical changes - if I listen to music with words while I work, I make mistakes
2. Cat HATES music - I can only listen on headphones while not needing to be able to hear anything else
3. Music friends moved away. Nobody I know locally cares about new music. I'm old enough that my "young" friends are all over thirty.
4. Never really moved to streaming because I resent platform services and like to own music, but the record stores closed down; never reconciled these two things.
5. Clumsy, bad at vinyl, so the new record stores aren't ideal for me.
6. Can no longer make mix CDs - that was a BIG part of how I processed new music, I'd always be planning one.

I'd say that this is all more or less about getting older.

A big problem is that when I was younger, even well into my thirties but pre-cat, I would listen to music while doing chores, and now the cat gets very upset if there's music playing.

Every year I listen to the Quietus's best-of lists and there's always, like, one album that absolutely hits the sweet spot and boom, I have my One New Album for the year, done.

I think the last thing I got really passionately into was Brian Eno's Another Green World and that was before the pandemic.
posted by Frowner at 6:20 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

Here's a book that got me started listening to classical music later in life: For the love of music.

For the basic background noise that Spotify / streaming caters to, I would agree that highly familiar songs are quite effective; something to keep in the background. What I've learned from starting to listen to more instrumental music is that you really have to give it your complete attention.

There was an old rule of thumb somewhere that in order to get the maximum dopamine hit from hearing music, you need to A) start by playing it a bunch (like 7+ times a day) so it gets ingrained B) Then, play it once every month or so for 2-3 times. I think there's something about the mix of familiarity and novelty.
posted by web5.0 at 6:27 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

Throwing some anecdata in. I had the worst taste in music when I was a teenager, and I haven't listened to that music since high school. And I don't listen to the music I listened to in my twenties, or my thirties. I am not great at finding new music, but I am constantly seeking new-to-me music, usually bands from earlier decades that I somehow missed.
posted by goatdog at 6:29 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

I was recently musing over the fact that I've been asked what kind of music I listen to as smalltalk, and my default response is stuff I listened to in high school (so decades out of date) -- I listen to a lot of radio, we've got a nice flora of non-network radio stations in town, including one that's literally some guy who decided he wanted to have his own FM station, and I get a lot of things I haven't heard of before. I don't think I'd have ever heard of Yeasayer or Hardy if not for that station. I don't know when the last time was that I intentionally re-listened to the bands I liked in high school.

This article is sort of on the edge of why I don't use streaming services; like, I say what I want to hear, but they always seem to veer off into...something else. Not interesting stuff I enjoy, but generic, have always heard, uninteresting stuff. The other benefit of radio is I don't need to spend what feels like decades curating my own stuff, how much do I have to thumbs down to not hear it, or did that thumbs down now have a ripple effect on the stuff I want to hear. Pandora is pretty good for "musak" at the antique mall because it's inoffensive and plays the hits and that's it.

As a parallel, mentioned in the article: I am a "don't rewatch movies, don't reread books" person, and talking about movies with Movie People has taught me that they rewatch movies all. the. time. I just can't do that, there's so much other good film that would be a better use of two hours in front of a TV than something I already know about. (having the Marvel/StarWars Movie Weekend -- which is some channel every weekend -- on while I'm doing chores doesn't count)
posted by AzraelBrown at 6:29 AM on April 26 [3 favorites]

I still listen to a lot of new music in my 40s, but because of Spotify, I don't necessarily know what it is. Lately I have been doing some concert reviews (well, reports, anyway, reviews implies a somewhat more critical perspective than I am taking in this pieces) for a site that covers the live music scene in Canada and whenever a new show gets thrown onto the writer's list for volunteers to cover it, I have to go look up who it is and find out if I might like them. Most recently, the X Ambassadors were in town, and I was like 'Oh, I don't think I know them,' only to go look them up on Spotify and discover that one of their songs, Unsteady, is one of my most played songs of all time.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:30 AM on April 26 [3 favorites]

I went through so many music phases as a late 80s-early 90s teenager. The Pink Floyd phase, the hairband phase, the metal phase, the OMG-who-is-this-Nirvana-band-I-need-to-find-everyone-else-that-sounds-like-them phase, the early rave phase, those six months where I only listened to Pretty Hate Machine, the goth and new wave phase, etc., etc..

I'm still finding new music. I'm still going through phases.
posted by HumanComplex at 6:33 AM on April 26 [4 favorites]

I still listen to a lot of new music in my 40s, but because of Spotify, I don't necessarily know what it is.

This is a funny thing about streaming, I like lofi in the background for reading but I don't really catch the artists much, it's more of a "put on a playlist and let it play for an hour or so" thing. I've tried to notice a few just so I can talk about it but it's almost more of a vibe. Same for a lot of the classical music I listen to for much the same reason. I catch more of the artists on things like Afrobeats, gumbé, and jazz.
posted by graymouser at 6:39 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

I may be a mutant, but I'm in my 60s and still find amazing new music.

Yep. I'm ancient. Most of my listening is still broadcast College Radio, and our local has some excellent genre-bending programmers. So I get to hear lots of different stuff. With long mixes sometimes I'll hear things that I'll love but without being able to identify the names of the artists.

One listening pattern that's changed in the 21st century: FB "exotic & unusual music" listening groups often suggest obscure artists that I can check out in more detail on YT. So while FB/YT can often be frustrating and annoying in general, that's one thing that they can be good for.
posted by ovvl at 6:41 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

Early 50s, still read 3 music magazines and regularly find new/new to me music through them, Bandcamp and a few email newsletters. IMO the issue here is the sample - most people that I know that are deeply into music don’t lean very heavily on Spotify if at all.
posted by ryanshepard at 6:44 AM on April 26 [3 favorites]

Oh, another thing I've done that helps me escape the "sonic wallpaper" of Spotify is getting into vinyl records. I got a record player a couple of years back and I am much more selective about what I listen to. It's a much more curated collection. But it does include some of that stuff I listened to back in high school as well as some newer records I have really loved.

The main thing, though, is that listening to it is a very different experience. I sit down in a chair near my record player and mindfully select a record that I will actually pay attention to for a little while.

It's certainly helped me appreciate aspects of the music I might not have before, and it's interesting that the albums I gravitate to there are not the same ones I might put on in the car or on my computer. For example, I basically never listened to Springsteen before but my goodness does Nebraska sound right on vinyl.
posted by synecdoche at 6:44 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

Interesting thing here is the chart that shows Gen Z distributing their interest pretty evenly between the 80/90/00/10s, which may suggest streaming allows the young to explore more niches before they settle on their favorites.

I don't have a favorite decade, but I've always been a digger. As a teen in the early 80s, it was 60s psych; as approached 30, you could buy LP after LP of 30s/40s Jazz and Country Western for three bucks a pop; house and techo didn't click with me until the 00s. Streaming is problematic for supporting artists, but I think Gen Z's deep dives in to Shoegaze and Synth Pop and Trip Hop are really cool.
posted by bendybendy at 6:46 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

I'm 55 and I'm discovering more new music (and new-to-me old music) now than ever, definitely didn't stick much to my younger tastes which were quite misguided and misdirected in many ways. And I enjoy the detective work involved in tracking down rare and elusive recordings too.
posted by remembrancer at 6:48 AM on April 26 [4 favorites]

Just listening to snippets of the songs in the current top 40, I don't hear anything that would have been out of place in eh 1998 or so?

This is an absolutely wild take. You could maybe peg it at like 2015 or something and I wouldn't wince too much, but this is not 1998 music. There are moody boy crooners, tons of neo-disco, the kind of country and rap that never would have charted in 1998 (if it had existed).

I'm an Old, but I try to listen to new music when I can, usually top 40. It's entirely safe, which is why it's charting, but lots of it? Really, really good. I've become a huge poptimist in the last 20 years or so. I still sort of loathe the 90s-2000s R&B slow jams and the Timbaland-style stuff that dominated the charts in that era, but there's great, great pop music all the time.

I have friends who have literally not listened to a new song in the last 20 years, or if they have, it's rehashed junk (Greta Van Fleet I'm looking at you). I just don't get it.
posted by uncleozzy at 6:54 AM on April 26 [5 favorites]

I didn't even get into music until I was in my late 30s/early 40s, so I don't feel like my musical tastes were set in stone as a young teenager at all. And once I did get into music, I worked my way backwards more than forwards. So my discovery of "new" music, was actually discovery of old music (basically the period between 1920 and, say, 1990). Not coincidentally, this all happened with the rise of MP3s and music download sites, where it was possible to explore in a lot of directions. I don't listen to Spotify or any other algorithmic music service, so I tend to learn about artists I have never heard of through people recommending things in the various palces I hang out online, or friends, or legacy media.
posted by briank at 7:00 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

I honestly hated the music that was playing when I was 13.
posted by kyrademon at 7:07 AM on April 26 [3 favorites]

According to last.fm, last year I listed to 1,773 artists. My most played artists were mostly new (Sampa the Great), or artists I discovered in my 30s and 40s (ArcadeFire, M83). I love discovering new music and try to listen to everything I can find. My Spotify release radar is a crazy mix of everything- indie, jazz, hip-hop, contemporary classical, but also Pearl Jam’s latest. My most played artist of the last couple years is probably Low, ostensibly a 90s band but I didn’t really connect with them until I heard their last album, released in 2021. These days it’s Waxahatchie on repeat.

I agree that kids are a factor in elongating tastes. Taylor Swift is somewhere in my top 20 played artists and I gave the new album a spin. I’m slowly warming to it.

It’s plausible I still qualify as listening to music “from my youth”- in high school I had a fairly broad set of tastes, mainly alternative, jazz, classical. My 20s were mostly trip-hop and jam bands. I listen to much more country and hip-hop today than I did as a teen.
posted by simra at 7:11 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

Honestly, I'm constantly struck (when I hear popular contemporary stuff) by how accomplished it is and how comparatively literate the lyrics are. I still find it boring, gotta admit, because most of the popular stuff that you hear if you're just randomly listening is going to be about true love, breakups, sex, I-am-kickass, you-are-pathetic and other themes that are most engaging when you're young, but I will say that just plain old pop radio is much better than it was in the eighties and nineties. Samuel Delany makes a great case for the pop radio of the sixties, but I wasn't around then.

Really, the whole "cat hates music" thing is my big, big problem - I'll listen to something from the Quietus, it will be abrasive (at least to my Old ears) but interesting, and I can tell that if I listen to it five or six times, I'll really get into it, but when I listen to music without headphones the cat comes in and whines and howls until I turn it off, and I just don't have a lot of non-work, non-reading time that isn't chore time where I would feel good about being unable to hear anything due to the headphones.
posted by Frowner at 7:13 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

a percentage of these responses seem incredibly non-representative.. I'm not sure pointing out that Spotify diminishes an exploratory approach to music is relevant, for example?

over 30 years ago a lot of people purchased CDs and cassette tapes. I worked at a store that sold CDs and cassette tapes. I frequented the specialty stores that sold the "cool" CDs and cassette tapes. A lot of people were buying Top 40 and there were a few perennial compilations that made big money, many of you probably owned one or two.

In general I think people just like sound going into their ears, and it's fair to say most people change over time and just settle into things. If you aren't most people, that's fine. I know I don't have the time or energy to get as excited about music as I did when I was in my teens/twenties, when weekly visits to specialty records stores and campus radio was my life. That was a lifetime ago.
posted by elkevelvet at 7:13 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

Even though I don't pay for streaming services--this just doesn't fit my life at all so no shade to those who do--one way I find out about any music--new, old, interesting--is when I play CBC Music playlists at work. If you click through, there are so many channels and I just pick stuff at random. Like, right now I'm listening to the Reclaimed channel for Indigenous music.

The Magic Plex server that Shepherd and I have has 395 days worth of music on it and given our eclectic tastes (his more so at this age), I load it up, hit shuffle, and hear stuff I didn't know we had! (There is a lot more music on there that isn't part of Big Mix because he removed any noise/spoken word on it. Those are on separate playlists.)
posted by Kitteh at 7:19 AM on April 26 [5 favorites]

I have my preferences but I will listen to literally anything someone has take the time and effort to record. I figure, genre X may not appeal directly to my tastes or demographic but they have more musical ability than me and I can admire and be moved by that.

Spotify is amazing for music discovery. It’s very very bad for rewarding any but the most played artists.
posted by simra at 7:21 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

Never stop learning, never stop discovering new music.
posted by tommasz at 7:21 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

My father being one of those boomers who think the Beatles were the last great band, because he was 11 when Help! came out, and him generally being unable to consider anything else good (like you're the same age as david byrne but you couldn't even get into the talking heads?), and just generally having a bad relationship with him means I refuse, obstinately, to get stuck in the middle-high-school music rut. I revisit some of those albums from time to time, and they do have a certain nostalgic sparkle, but I neurotically, obsessively, revolt at the idea of being a musical fuddy duddy who thinks the 90s were it and everything since then falls short. I'd rather die.
posted by dis_integration at 7:28 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

Solved the problem of falling out of the musical mainstream by never having been in the musical mainstream.
posted by Artw at 7:31 AM on April 26 [6 favorites]

I'm 53 and still love a lot (not all) of music from the '80s and '90s, but I never really stopped listening to new music. I just posted 3 brand new songs by musicians who are all under 30.
Also, when I was in my teens and my early 20s, I was very much a rockist, heavy metal, etc., so I missed out on a lot of great music. I'm having a lot of fun going back to listen to a lot of goth, post-punk, shoegaze, etc., that I missed out on the first time around.
posted by signal at 7:36 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

Why would I listen to new music? I haven't listened to all the old music yet.
posted by Faint of Butt at 7:37 AM on April 26 [9 favorites]

Ugh hell this is me. I was 21 in 1988, and anything made after 1993 just does nothing for me. Except techno, I like that. I have all these friends who are about five years younger than me and they all absolutely worship the band Pavement, and I do. not. get. it. They're... competent, but I don't see the reason for the worship.

Ultimately, my musical stagnation is because there's been very little in the way of new styles of music since then (except techno). It all sounds the same: I'm always like "oh these guys are Love and Rockets with a dash of the Pixies" and then go back and listen to them. Christ, I'm lame.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 7:45 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

I will listen to literally anything someone has take the time and effort to record.

I'm mostly with you there, but there is music that can sound so aggressively bad: every choice in production, the blatant lack of imagination, the offensive politics in the lyrics (in short, a lot of so-called country today) that I just can't
posted by elkevelvet at 7:46 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

One thing I've found as I age is that my tastes move away from the center in both directions, as in I listen to a lot of Death Metal and Metal Core, like Spiritbox, Arch Enemy, Jinjer, etc. which I didn't when I was younger, and I also listen to very mainstream K-Pop, like Le Sserafim and New Jeans, but I'm eschewing the more sedate, hipster-adjacent rock / folk like Boygenius (which is great but not my jam right now).
posted by signal at 7:47 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

While I listen to new music more than old (the new St. Vincent album just came out today, yay!) I will agree that the genres I listen to haven't changed that much since my 20s. Maybe a bit more hiphop now but otherwise 15-25 year-old me would probably dig much of what I listen to now. For me part of the problem is with streaming there are so many albums to listen to so albums will get a listen or two and I'll favourite a couple of songs and move on to the next thing, whereas in the past it would probably be like 1 or 2 new ones a month that I could really spend time on. Then when a concert's coming up I'll spend a couple of weeks doing a deep dive on that artist so that I'm "ready" for it.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 7:51 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

I’m in my late 30s and I can see the lack of listening to new artists in my friends. The exceptions are my friends who go to music festivals or who watch a lot of TikTok. I used to go to festivals and would research the artists beforehand and read recs on who to see, and sometimes just wander around to see who I might like. But then for a while I wasn’t going to festivals and the music I listened to stagnated. TikTok is my main discovery tool now - not even on purpose. I don’t search for new music on there but it figures out what I might like based on other interests and I’ve gone to so many concerts over the last few years of artists I’ve first seen on TikTok (who then get commercial success in part due to TikTok success). It’s not even in genres I used to listen to. Then sometimes I’ll put together playlists on Spotify and Spotify will recommend artists based on that. I think I’ve gotten more obsessed over artists than I used to when I was younger. I’m going to All Things Go in the fall and asked if any of my friends wanted to go with me but the lineup was largely ??? to most of them.
posted by loulou718 at 7:51 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

I'm mainly interested in music that there are jam sessions for. "old time" and bluegrass are my mainstays right now, but I've attempted Django style jazz too. I went through a tango phase and choro. I play a bit of cajun though there aren't any public cajun jams around here. I mostly find new tunes because other folks play them and I want to know them for the next jam. To an outsider it probably all sounds the same. Most of the tunes are really old.

I mostly listen to this stuff in learning mode, so slowing it down, repeating sections, etc. Not really leaving it on in the background, maybe sometimes when I'm driving.

As far as pure listening, I do like some modern jazz, though not as a participant. Sons of Kemet, Julian Lage, Domi and JD Beck, Bill Frisell. Whatever the local string quartet is playing, I'm a big fan of their tone and the hall they play in. I've been eyeing african music a bit, that might be fun to learn.

I don't listen to music over and over like I did at age 14. There's just not enough novelty there I guess. Most pop music seems super boring and samey same, plus there's no jam session for it so why bother?
posted by Ansible at 7:52 AM on April 26 [4 favorites]

Apple Music's infinite playlists have been discovery lifesavers for me. Usually. Except when I discover that the band I like (Chvrches) is nothing like anything else the algorithm thinks is similar. But otherwise, ok go off from Stromae or L'Imperatrice or Manu Dibango, and I'll occasionally stop and go "oh dang, that's a bop" and add it to my library. If I find myself listening to it more than a few times, I dig out their Bandcamp or at least buy the track from iTunes or Amazon so they get their shiny nickel up front and not after 50,000 plays. And sometimes it's even a new band so I'm not always just contributing to the rehab of a dusty old star from the 70s.
posted by Kyol at 7:53 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

Oh, 13! You mean the last year I had time to sit still and listen to an entire song just in case I liked it?
posted by amtho at 7:54 AM on April 26 [4 favorites]

IMO, the later charts basically represent that the music you listen to is as much of a part of a 'popularity contest' as the clothes you wear, the tv shows you like etc, so as you get away from that driver of insular popularity signifiers, then it makes sense you would spiral away from the most popular music.

Also those charts don't recognize that 'popularity' is a variable, it seems to treat 'popular' as a fixed value.

Also, my kids and wife listen to Spotify, and Amazon Music, and it automatically plays the top few songs in whatever set playlist, and has very little variability - like Alsweigert said "These conclusions are the algorithm tail wagging the dog." So to get it to play different stuff, you have to build your own playlists - which most likely drives you outwards on the 'popularity' chart.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:57 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

The NYT data that shows that your favorite music came out roughly aligned with your high school years is accurate for me—but the albums I listen to most from that era are albums I didn't hear until college, and other than Radiohead I almost never play anything I actually listened to in high school.

I'm still listening to new music, and my resolution this year was to play more vinyl so that I'm more engaged with the music than just hitting "play" on Spotify. But even on Spotify I've always prefered to listen to full albums than any of the generated playlists.* I guess one place where my musical tastes have stagnated is that the album (ideally one that fits on a single LP; I don't have time for double albums and all those late 90s / early aughts 70 minute albums drag) is the ideal length for a musical statement.

* Discover Weekly was amazing when it came out. Then everybody stopped making their own playlists, the algorithm has nothing to chew on, and now I basically get the same weird mix every week with either songs or artists that I already know. Meanwhile, half my listening has been in Spanish for the past three years and I still have never gotten a song with Spanish lyrics in the playlist.
posted by thecaddy at 7:58 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

I continue to be mystified when it's suggested that no longer listening to music and/or musical genres that are for the most part produced by twentysomethings and consumed by teenagers means that a person has ceased to grow and thrive and experience musical/artistic life. A musician or group swimming in the larger pond of "popular music" catches my attention every so often--Hiatus Kaiyote, for example--but I don't listen to things like Spotify searching for my "next thing" in music the way I listened to WBCN back in the late 70s to mid 80s. Does that mean I've stopped listening to "new music." I mean, maybe? It depends on what you mean by "new music" What I have done is spend a lot of time listening to and discovering jazz and classical music both live and in recordings. This all was certainly new to me at one time, and a good bit of it was just plain new. So, I don't listen to the modern-day equivalent of top 40 radio, not that I ever really did, but I'm glad I don't. That doesn't mean I sit around my apartment playing my old Clash albums over and over and over. I'm consuming new and new-to-me music all the time, just not in a way that would register on Spotify.
posted by slkinsey at 7:59 AM on April 26 [3 favorites]

I think this post implies a bunch of sensationalist questions we're all thinking about and responding to, which is, as you get older how much do slow down? Am I old? When are we just a walking automaton of habits and when are we living authentically? Can a comfortable experience be a good experience? Is new music any good?

On one hand those are interesting questions, but my opinion is, eh, everybody's valid. People who don't follow new music are valid. People listening to new albums are valid. Musical theater fans are valid, metal fans are valid. People having fewer new experiences are valid. The word valid has lost all meaning to me as I've typed this. There's only so many hours in the day, and a lot of experiences to have in the world. Personally, at 34, I've added new songs to my favorite songs playlist this year, and listened to lots of new music. But I haven't finished a book yet in 2024, so, you know. My ability to process information is provided by physical components that are in a wrestling match with entropy, there's no denying it. But, in the meantime, here's some feel good retro vibes off of Cindy Lee's Diamond Jubilee, from earlier this year.
posted by Rinku at 8:04 AM on April 26 [7 favorites]

Meanwhile, my favorite song turned 100 this year.
posted by grubi at 8:09 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

I've been getting my new music from Live x Live (it was the basis for Samsung's service years ago) and Pandora most recently, although I also do live shows, and shows at the RenFaire. They let me mark music I like, and then I'll buy it on iTunes. (Once I've bought 3 songs by an artist, I start considering buying their albums.)
Back when Planet Music was a thing, I guess in the 90s, I'd just graze and buy a bunch of interesting looking CDs. That was fun, but expensive. The library I used to go to had a pretty big CD collection, and I'd just sit and go through it, looking for interesting music.
I've got about 80 gigs of music on my phone, because that's all it can hold (I miss my memory card slot!), with playlists of Rock, Jazz, Harp music, Fiddles, Bluegrass, singalong, and recently downloaded stuff.
I like music.
posted by Spike Glee at 8:09 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

I wanted to drop my two cents on Spotify: I use it a lot, and discovered that if you know how to do it, it's pretty decent for finding new artists, and also delve into their "deep cuts". Someone mentioned the "Discover Weekly" playlist, and that's one that you can "follow" and it updates every Monday. I don't always check it out, but every couple of weeks I'll give it a listen while driving around. If there's a song I like, I add it to a personal playlist of new music to play on repeat so I can determine if the song should go into my permanent library.

If I like the song, I'll check out the artist, and Spotify often have a "This is [Artist's Name]" playlist on their page, if they have enough songs (probably 30 songs or so). This playlist includes their popular stuff, as well as their deep cuts that are not singles but other people have played a lot, and even songs they're featured on from other artists. If an artist doesn't have enough songs for that playlist, that means it's very quick to select their entire discography and add to a playlist and just go through that. That's what I did for CLOW, a Japanese singer/songwriter I found through Discover Weekly.

> Discover Weekly was amazing when it came out....
I don't know what makes mine different, but I'd say every month I'd get one song that I've already heard. Also, I make the effort to "hide" songs from that playlist that I particularly don't like and don't want to hear again ever. My mix is now about a third Japanese because of recent tastes, and it definitely feels like it goes off of what I've been listening to but getting artists I've never heard before that sounds similar.
posted by numaner at 8:09 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

I love my libraries' Freegal (unlimited streaming, download 5 songs a week!) and Hoopla (can check out entire albums for 7 days streaming) subscriptions. Check if your library has music options beyond the dusty CDs! (Though I totally will check those out too).
posted by spamandkimchi at 8:11 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

I think this post implies a bunch of sensationalist questions we're all thinking about and responding to, which is, as you get older how much do slow down? Am I old? When are we just a walking automaton of habits and when are we living authentically? Can a comfortable experience be a good experience? Is new music any good?

This is what is interesting to me! Like, middle age for my generation is so not like the middle age of my parents generation. For all of us that are forty plus, do you remember your parents at your age engaging in new music? I don't! If you had a parent who was your musical guide or interested in the new new, I'd be willing to bet they were an outlier.

Also, we have such a stigma against being seen as old even when we declare--as I have seen on the Blue before--that we do not care about being or getting older. Music can be one of those "I refuse to be seen as an old fuddy-duddy" benchmarks for people. I mean, I like what I like, and a lot of it is, yes, music I loved when I was in my teen and early 20s, but I don't feel the need to be au courant. I like discovering things organically and I try to make room in my world for that when it comes to music.

(I have now moved over to the Jazz Songbook channel on CBC playlists; 15 year old me would have been appalled, but hey, 15 year old me has to live with 47 year old me and we are just barely the same person)
posted by Kitteh at 8:11 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

And agree with folks who use the Best [albums] of [YEAR] lists as an exploratory tool. I've also been exploring new albums by old faves, e.g. Depeche Mode's Memento Mori which actually got me to go see them live!
posted by spamandkimchi at 8:13 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

Am I old?

Probably older than you think. [Also, Pope is Catholic, Bears shit in the woods, &c...]
posted by chavenet at 8:14 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

Bears shit in the woods

spoken like someone who has never come across a dark nutty cluster on their lawn!
posted by elkevelvet at 8:20 AM on April 26 [3 favorites]

The secret subtext of this entire study is simply this: "Advertisers! Look! We have a wide range of potentially-valuable audience demographics! See how much we know about them? Let's talk!"
posted by aramaic at 8:23 AM on April 26 [4 favorites]

One thing that annoys me is that I used to ask my smart speaker to "play some music" and it would start a playlist that would include songs I already liked as well as some new music. For the last couple of years something's changed and it plays the same playlist, or at least very similar ones, all the time so I don't get to hear new music that way.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 8:27 AM on April 26 [4 favorites]

One of the many reasons I dropped Spotify was because it kept feeding me only the music it knew I already liked (with rare exceptions) unlike Google Play Music (RIP) which constantly suggested new stuff by artists that I'd never heard of, but who I almost always enjoyed after a listen.

Currently on Tidal, because my weekly suggestions are always full of new artists. I'd say most of the music I listen to regularly is stuff I discovered in the past 10 years (but not necessarily released in the past 10 years).

I still listen to the old stuff, just not as much.

Also, my monthly/yearly recap emails are pretty much useless, because they end up filled with artists who just have an above average number of tracks on whichever album of theirs I happened to listen to that month.
posted by exolstice at 8:27 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

Spotify seemed insistent on finding its way back to 80s music or classic rock no matter where I started.

I had this problem with Pandora, favorite one classic 80s new wave track and suddenly it would become a nostalgia channel. I learned to be very careful about my favorites for a while.
posted by tavella at 8:29 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

The related thing that I also kind of wonder about is how much do people continue to like bands they were first exposed to in their early teens? Like I used to be a _huge_ Depeche Mode fan, I bought their singles box sets, I couldn't get enough (heh, unintentional). But everything after Sounds of the Universe has bounced off of me. Honestly I'm surprised it's that late, the last album that I could sing along to is probably Songs of Faith and Devotion from when I was still a teenager. But play counts don't lie, I've listened to plenty of Ultra, Exciter and Playing the Angel, it just sort of dies off after Sounds of the Universe.

And fair enough, they're not the same band that wrote Black Celebration. They've changed, they've moved on, and that's fine. And yet I'm not stuck only liking bands that always sound the same as they always did - Neil & Chris always feel comfortable reinventing the Pet Shop Boys' sound every now and then and I still find myself coming back to their new stuff. Even Elysium, which was a huge departure! Ok, apparently the only song I ever listened to from Hotspot was Monkey Business, but damn that song was a highlight.
posted by Kyol at 8:36 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

I'm definitely in the "stopped finding new music" camp, and probably around age 35.

One part is I just don't listen as much. I don't feel the need for background music if I'm not giving it my attention, and I prefer podcasts when driving, exercising, or doing household tasks.

Related is musical taste is less a part of my identity. I'd talk about music a lot back in my 20s; I enjoyed music but also I was a nerd cliche who found knowing a lot about bands and music increased the respect I got and that part of my social life is basically gone.

I explore new things in other hobbies, so I don't think it's just that I'm old and set in my ways.
posted by mark k at 8:36 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

But... that kind of actually-popular music seems to have really stagnated? Since the 1980s there was a big pulse of change as hiphop influences moved in as far as they were going to and... that's it? Just listening to snippets of the songs in the current top 40, I don't hear anything that would have been out of place in eh 1998 or so?

These kinds of takes are always interesting to me because I have my own version, but it’s like “radio rap production has been kind of stagnant since the early 10s” which is to say a 1998 cutoff sounds nuts to me. Which makes me wonder if mine sounds nuts to The Kids.
posted by atoxyl at 8:45 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

I've certainly slowed down finding new music, but that just means I get to discover the good stuff honestly, after the hype and backlash have died down.
posted by whuppy at 8:45 AM on April 26 [3 favorites]

About the only thing I have in common with 13 year old me in terms of music taste is that once I've heard a song a dozen or two times, I'm bored of it forever. My entire musical life has been a pursuit of novelty, now as then (except the internet and DAB now makes it much easier).
posted by Dysk at 8:54 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

I actually have found a number of new faves in my 40s. I dunno I look at all these charts and mostly what I see is "when you're a kid everything is new, when you're an adult you have to sift the new from the old, and that's a heavier lift, and as an adult you might not have the time or energy."

I learned about so much music, SO MUCH, in college. But I no longer have a lifestyle where I can just browse Napster for 5 hours a day or lie around listening to a new album while enjoying some fine psychedelics, lol. But I still learn about new music because I have human beings to whom I speak and they tell me about stuff, or they're playing a song at their house and I'm like hey what's this, or my boyfriend wants to see a band and I don't know them yet.

Also podcasts have kind of replaced music in my day-to-day as far as what is on in the background; but part of why I enjoy them is that they remind me of having terrestrial radio on all day when I was younger. It's just that terrestrial radio also played more music than the podcasts do.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:57 AM on April 26 [4 favorites]

Sigh. I just checked Spotify and neither my "Release Radar" or "New Releases for You" list includes the new St. Vincent, despite the fact that I listened to Masseduction on repeat for like six months in 2017.

God, I miss print and having a single place that could tell me "hey, here's the new albums and new movies that are coming out this week."

(Also I miss albums coming out on Tuesday)
posted by thecaddy at 8:58 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

I check out the new releases in Youtube Music (that's the service I subscribe to) every week because it is terrible at recommending me new stuff that I might like even from artists already in my library. But I was given the heads up about St. Vincent either from the Guardian front page or my Google News feed.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 9:05 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

For this reason every New Year’s Eve my husband and I make a giant cheese plate and sit down to watch the videos of “what the kids are into this year” and that’s how I discovered lil nas X and we’re drinking wine and blue cheese and going “hmm the juxtaposition of rap masculinity with aggressive homosexual imagery is quite fascinating! Now who’s this dojo cat I keep hearing about ?”

Also I just ask my kids what is cool and trust them completely without question because my ability to judge cool died in 2013.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 9:05 AM on April 26 [5 favorites]

Also thanks to the internet sometimes I discover new old music as well. The other day I had the random thought that i'd like to hear Alberto Balsam by Aphex Twin and then got served up a bunch of older Aphex Twin I'd never really heard before. It's great!
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 9:07 AM on April 26 [3 favorites]

I am over 40, and I love finding new music. I stream on YouTube Music, and I am a Discover Mix junkie. Seriously, I'm always chasing the dragon of the dopamine rush of finding new songs. I mostly listen to my Supermix because those are all great songs I love, but I get excited for Wednesday because that's new music day.

Then, when I find a new song that I love I start a radio station for the song and see what's similar. I'll toggle between the Discover and Popular options to find even more great music.

I was just wondering last night how many hundreds of new songs I've listened to because of my change to streaming. For me, this is a golden era of music discovery. Even the Napster boom pales in comparison.
posted by betaray at 9:13 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

Our kids still sometimes complain about the music we used to play in the car on long journeys when they were young, that they still find themselves humming the tunes, and still finding it comforting, even though their tastes are now way different.
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 9:16 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

This is an absolutely wild take. You could maybe peg it at like 2015 or something and I wouldn't wince too much, but this is not 1998 music. There are moody boy crooners, tons of neo-disco, the kind of country and rap that never would have charted in 1998 (if it had existed).

I expect a lot of this hinges on you paying enough attention over a long time that differences I don't see loom large to you. Maybe you want to say that that Benson Boone song is doing something new and exciting that Savage Garden wasn't doing in 1998, but they seem pretty samey to me.

To be clear, I'm not saying you're wrong. It's like you can easily identify a very stereotypical Igbo face as opposed to a very stereotypical Yoruba face, while I'm over here easily saying which face is Finnish and which is German.

But... I can't help but think that the difference between the 2024 top 40 and 2000 top 40 is smaller than the difference between the 1975 top 40 vs the 1950.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 9:17 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

Honestly, a lot of new music finds are serendipity. Podcasts with weird interstitial songs, recommendations, campus radio, the Room List in that file seeking app for likeminded souls.

Oh yeah, and MeFi Music Swaps! So many cool musical rabbit holes found that way. Let's do more of those.
posted by Hardcore Poser at 9:32 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

I have mixed feelings about streaming music services, but they have absolutely facilitated me finding a ton of new music, usually by deciding something is interesting and doing a deep dive on it. Thats not particularly tied to any era though, frequently landing me in the 60s and 70s as well as recent stuff.

(To me “recent” is now “in the last 20 years”, so that’s a little time stuck too.)
posted by Artw at 9:38 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

Just yesterday my husband put on Pearl Jam and the kids noped right out of the room and for a glorious half an hour we had peace and quiet (and Eddie Vedder)
posted by St. Peepsburg at 9:43 AM on April 26 [4 favorites]

I agree with the premise and think that my "peak influence" may have been around 10.

Commenting to point out that the whole "Parents vs Empty Nesters" effect is a bad read of the data cemented into the article's text. The chart showing the effect is actually labelled Parents and All Users. The chart was immediately suspect because there aren't any 20-year-old Empty Nesters.
posted by achrise at 9:44 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

I tend to think that the (usually) teenage hormones have a lot to do with forming strong emotional bonds with music that you encounter at that age, or at least that was the case for me--I'd peg my peak years as being from about 13-23. I can still find new music and musicians that catch my attention (as with this recent FPP), but it's less frequent--like, an artist will really grab me maybe every two or three years now (I'm nearly 60).
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:50 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

NTS radio is fantastic--often, there are sets put together by artists I already love, which then feature new-to-me stuff. Random shows that just sound interesting from the summary usually prove to be worthwhile. Also here to second The Quietus as a reliable recommendation resource.

Brand new to me yesterday was music blog No Bells--not sure how I feel about this one, yet.
posted by german_bight at 10:13 AM on April 26 [3 favorites]

Looks like our most played albums of the moment are the new Beyonce (2024), the new Idles (2024), and the Andre 3000 flute toot album (2023), so that’s not doing too bad for old fucks.

Probably makes us less cool that New Blue Sun has become our “we’re going to sleep, throw something on” album, replacing Music for Airports.
posted by Artw at 10:19 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

The last several years, I've voraciously sought out new music, and I'm unique amongst my friends, who are all pushing 40. It's hard to tell what drives me to find new artists. Am I craving novelty? Is it because I fixated on just a couple artists for too long? Am I a digital hoarder? All of these things are true at once.

Of course, what's more interesting than the reasons why, in this discussion, is what. I generally stick close to genres I already enjoy. But time has let me fan out into adjacent genres, and pushed me to discover new ones. In high school and college, I would have bailed on any jazz record and shunned modern classical. If it wasn't indie, I want very interested—but I grew up. Now, you'd find some pretty esoteric stuff on my playlists, like Totalism, Tishoumaren, Ambient Americana, even Scottish Folk.

The strongest force behind my discovery binge is rateyourmusic.com, whose charts I visit at least weekly. Year-end lists, too, but lately I can guess at them because I watched the RYM charts.

My core point is that foregoing the algorithmic discovery engine got me out of a rut. A community of diverse music lovers helped me defy the trend identified in the article. The incredible variety helps me feel some wonder, still, and hope in our creativity. If you are craving the same, I hope my experience helps inform yours.
posted by criticalyeast at 10:20 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

I survived the toddler years without hearing horrible kids music by simply refusing to play horrible kids music. The tadpole listened to whatever we were playing or what was on the radio.

We did the same. I was over the moon when my two year old asked for "more Squarepusher!" and immensely pleased to be able to tell a songwriter at a gig that his favourite song at age six was one of hers. He's just completed his GCSE music coursework with full marks after composing a surprisingly complex and melodic synthwave/drum and bass mashup thing exploring a theme of space exploration, and is also pretty handy on the piano.

Play your kids the music you love! They'll sing nursery rhymes and whatever at school, your job is to teach them about the music that matters to you*.

*Within reason obvs, maybe save Wu Tang et al for a bit later on.
posted by tomsk at 10:34 AM on April 26 [5 favorites]

Pondering a recent podcast where the host said "I don't listen to music the way I did when I was a kid because I no longer need music to give shape to my emotions anymore; I'm emotionally literate and capable of self-regulating now." I feel like not only is this super true for me but also applies to how I consume a lot of art and the way I attach or not to it.

I don't LOOOOOOVE a song or an artist the way I did when I was 19 because I don't feel ANYTHING the way I did when I was 19. My emotions are no longer an unmanageable indistinct flood in desperate need of articulation. And though I still find art everywhere that does articulate my emotions and it is great, it no longer has that "if I couldn't hear/see/read this I would literally die unseen and unheard" feeling.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 10:42 AM on April 26 [10 favorites]

Iggy Pop's radio show, Iggy Confidential, is one good way to hear songs you might not have heard before.
posted by pracowity at 10:50 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

There's a quote attributed to Napoleon to the effect of: "If you want to understand a man, know the world he knew at 20 years old."
posted by doctornemo at 11:11 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

I wonder if all those graphs and charts may suggest some conclusion other than simply one's age influencing one's inclination to hear "new" music. Maybe living past 30 is a lesser evil than we are led to believe. Rock and Roll, for example, is not created in a vacuum. Good Rock and Roll is a dangerous musical outlier, anathema to mainstream values because it sends a message to a specific demographic. I suggest hip-hop is a child of the music transformation that began in the 1950s.

I turned 17 in 1962. My musical diet began with old-fashioned county blues (Hank Williams) but included Elvis, The Everly Bros, Bobby Darin, Little Richard, The Isely Bros, etc. But as the '60s evolved, so did the nature of Rock and Roll. This explosion of incredible music lasted about 20 years. Those times cradle the bedrock of my musical taste. I credit the background of the Vietnam War and the Peace movement for nursing the foundations of the music of those times. It was inspired. I've never lost my fondness for Hendrix, Clapton, Stevie Ray, and an almost endless list of others—Taj Mahal, Stevie Wonder, Dylan, Buddy Guy, Dave von Ron, Emmy Lou Harris, the list goes on. Though many of these artists--especially the blues singers--brought styling such as Delta Blues and Piedmont songs into the 60s and 70s, the social and political climate kept them in the public ear.

Since the 80s, I have been drawn to old recordings of blues singers from the 20s and thirties, as well as performers such as Robert Earl Kean, Todd Snider, John Prine, Guy Clark, and others in that vein.

I find their work more compatible than songs directed towards the various generations. Hip-hop doesn't ring my bell, primarily for stylistic reasons rather than their message. The breadth of my musical taste is not impressive. I find the YouTube algorithms interesting enough that I often click on artists I don't know.
posted by mule98J at 11:13 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

Peak music nostalgia for me is definitely about age 19-24 and it’s not that I wasn’t listening to a ton of music as a teenager. It was just soundtracking a more emotionally intense life when I was a bit older which I think is an underrated factor. That’s also when I felt most on top of what was cool, you know, on top of the next big thing.

I certainly haven’t stopped finding new music or even new genres in my mid-30s, I just don’t even try to know everything happening with everything - or with anything - anymore.
posted by atoxyl at 11:14 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

put on Pearl Jam and the kids noped right out of the room and for a glorious half an hour we had peace and quiet

"let's put on some Pearl Jam for the peace and quiet" is ... chef's kiss
posted by chavenet at 11:14 AM on April 26 [5 favorites]

Feels like every generation rediscovers this.

Obligatory Onion article from 2004: "Lifelong Love Affair with Music Ends at Age 35."
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 11:18 AM on April 26 [3 favorites]

I genuinely wonder if not liking the newest music is really much of a "sin" at all. Am I faulty if I don't like new stuff (generally speaking)? Shouldn't the young people enjoy their music and nobody should care about whether this old fart is into it too? It seems the whole dynamic we're discussing and that the article is about operates on the assumption that liking new music is inherently better somehow. But is it?
posted by grubi at 11:26 AM on April 26 [5 favorites]

To follow up: what kid wants their parents to be into the same music as them? When I was growing up, that would have been embarrassing.
posted by grubi at 11:27 AM on April 26 [3 favorites]

GenX here. So much of my musical taste came from my teen years:
-classical, when I was playing the cello, and I can still vividly recall hearing some symphonies and concerti for the first time
-pop->rock->punk->New Wave, starting from listening to the radio, then talking with people and getting mix tapes.

In my 20s I fell hard for the Coil/World Serpent world.

...and then nothing new for decades, thanks to being a parent and working very long hours sans music. Also having very different tastes from my wife.

Around 2012 my daughter introduced me to Metalocalypse, and I dove deeply into metal of all kinds, which reverbed nicely with my teen punk and classical loves.

Now I listen to music mostly in YouTube, because it's easy to find stuff and make playlists. Bandcamp is a good way to find interesting stuff. And a couple of friends DJ online for college radio shows.
posted by doctornemo at 11:28 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

It seems the whole dynamic we're discussing and that the article is about operates on the assumption that liking new music is inherently better somehow. But is it?

I think for a lot of people it's a signal for being out of touch with the world as a whole. Not so much that "liking new music" is better as that knowing what is going on is preferable to becoming ossified in some way. I don't know if music has the same place in the culture for young people that it had for earlier generations, where it was like, knowing the new music meant knowing what kind of ideas are important right now, what kind of attitudes -- how are we feeling, as a culture, about sex and love and money and the future and the past? A lot of that is revealed through the art that is coming out, so if you aren't keeping up there's a sense that you honestly don't understand the world as it is right now.

It's also part of a western idolizing of youth and a fear of losing youth and any of its trappings, of course.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 11:38 AM on April 26 [6 favorites]

Don't get me wrong, I'll always have a soft spot for the alternative rock and pop music that was popular during the mid to late nineties, when I was in high school. However, that doesn't mean that this is the only music that I ever listen to. Far from it.

Even in my early forties, I feel like I'm discovering new music all the time.

I don't think that getting older necessarily correlates to discovering less new music. I think it depends more on whether or not a person prioritizes music discovery as a hobby, despite all the other demands that are competing for their attention.
posted by carnival_night_zone at 11:38 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

If you aren't most people, that's fine

In my experience, most people aren't most people.
posted by Foosnark at 11:38 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

I think for a lot of people it's a signal for being out of touch with the world as a whole. Not so much that "liking new music" is better as that knowing what is going on is preferable to becoming ossified in some way.

Yeah, to take it one step further, for me I think it's less about liking new music as it is a willingness to understand the appeal of it. I don't have to personally enjoy it, but I do think it's important to process in order to understand the shape of the world.

The main goal is never to be a "disco sucks" or "I call it crap music" person, basically.
posted by uncleozzy at 11:46 AM on April 26 [6 favorites]

Repetition and positive reinforcement still works, even for olds. I listen to a lot of KEXP and I am starting to recognize new songs. One band sounds just like Stereolab! (They did play Detachable Penis this morning, so Gen-X neurons are still occasionally activated.)
posted by credulous at 11:53 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

GenX here. Gonna be 50 this year and I think one of the most awesome things about being an old lady is I no longer give a frilly fuck about what people think about my musical tastes. When I was young, I adored punk rock, industrial, metal, and eventually grunge. I grew up listening to country music from my parents and blues from family friends. I saw the Ramones, BB King, Pixies, Chili Peppers, and NIN all in the same year. But, I also enjoyed a good bop. I liked New Kids, Bobby B, Whitney, and whatever random shit played on top 40. Unfortunately, I bought into the misogynistic bullshit that pop music was less than "real music" and therefore it had to be my secret pleasure. Things only listened to when alone and when it came on a party, I had to groan and whine convincingly and try not to dance.

But once I hit 40, I legit stopped giving a damn and began to embrace all the pop of my youth and the new stuff. I branched out into hip-hop, pop, emo, and whatever else struck my fancy. Then in the height of the pandemic, my best friend (who was 50 at the time) turned me on to BTS and I have since fell down the K-pop pit of doom and glory. I LOVE finding new music. I LOVE being able to enjoy what I like when I want and I am SO VERY tired of the musical elitism that kept me away from enjoying pop as much as I enjoyed Mojo Nixon.

I swear by all that is holy that if I ever hear myself say that "Music today is crap" it's time to shuffle off this mortal coil and be done. New music is awesome.
posted by teleri025 at 12:02 PM on April 26 [6 favorites]

For a lot of kids, listening to music is a social activity. You (plural) like some band or kind of music. You listen to it together when you hang out. You go to concerts together. It's what's on at parties. It's your secret handshake. You have to keep up and you want to keep up.

As you get older, maybe not so much.
posted by pracowity at 12:10 PM on April 26 [3 favorites]

It was the Yield album too. They wouldn’t come down for dinner till we turned it off.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 12:21 PM on April 26 [1 favorite]

You're not supposed to like old music. Planned obsolescence. Always buy the latest model.
posted by pracowity at 12:39 PM on April 26 [1 favorite]

For all of us that are forty plus, do you remember your parents at your age engaging in new music?

My father has listened to basically one "oldies" rock station my entire life. We could wring a concession to one of "our" stations from time to time, but he didn't like any of it and made that extremely clear.

A few years back my brother posted a little story about waiting for our father at a park. Dad pulled up singing along to "Rooster". My brother didn't know if the profound disbelief and vague outrage he felt was about "his" music being on the oldies station or Dad singing along to Alice in Chains thirty years too late.

Not sure how to chart an experience like that on one of these graphs, but it made me laugh really hard at the time.
posted by EvaDestruction at 12:52 PM on April 26 [1 favorite]

Nick Lowe breezed through town late last year on his small-venue concert tour, and it was a very good time. At one point in the show, he said "We're going to play a bit of our new material, but I can assure you that the new songs sound exactly like the old ones, so not to worry!!"
posted by gimonca at 1:33 PM on April 26 [6 favorites]

A track I discovered and enjoyed later in life, that might be on-topic: Losing My Edge by LCD Soundsystem.

Follow-up punchline: that was released 22 years ago now.....
posted by gimonca at 1:41 PM on April 26 [2 favorites]

I'm still discovering new music. My current favorite: Brigitte Calls Me Baby. I was lucky enough to see them last week and I think they may be the best band around today.
posted by mike3k at 1:47 PM on April 26 [2 favorites]

When I think back to the formative years for me, they were complicated. Many, many different trends happening, many contradicting pressures on a young person.

There was the music you identified with, that represented who you thought you were. For me in that time, Patti Smith, David Byrne, Elvis Costello, Andy Partridge as examples. There was also the music that was all around you, Elton, Frampton, Donna Summer, the inescapable Bee Gees. I remember them both, it's all good, but in different ways.

I was in a pub quiz setting with a team of people a couple of years ago. The 'music round' section came up, we had to guess the song after hearing a clip of the first few seconds. The theme: 1970s Disco. I got every last one of them by myself. In spite of my hard-won record-store-hipster merit badges, that reputation as the "disco guy" follows me around to this day.

One of these days, maybe they'll do "post punk obscurities" and I'll have a chance to run the table again.
posted by gimonca at 1:54 PM on April 26 [3 favorites]

I'm 65. I will forever adore the music of the late '60s and all the '70s as my "coming of age" music, and all those songs bring back specific and important memories. I was then a radio DJ in the '80s, 90s, and 00s, and was married to a musician. I know so many songs from those years, can sing along and identify the artist, album, and year, and have a lot of favorites. But they do not conjure up specific memories, just the town I lived in when they were big. Since I changed jobs, I've liked a lot of new music, just not as many songs, and they don't conjure up memories at all. I think that you can discover and like music all your life, but those songs that remind you of your formative years will just be extra special.
posted by Miss Cellania at 2:05 PM on April 26 [1 favorite]

I don't LOOOOOOVE a song or an artist the way I did when I was 19 because I don't feel ANYTHING the way I did when I was 19. My emotions are no longer an unmanageable indistinct flood in desperate need of articulation. And though I still find art everywhere that does articulate my emotions and it is great, it no longer has that "if I couldn't hear/see/read this I would literally die unseen and unheard" feeling.

put this comment in the moma

This is perfect and accurate. During your teens and 20s, all feelings are A Big Feeling. Music helps you with those, gives you an outlet for the heartbreak/joy/etc because you are just fucking swimming in your feels. Like, when I hear the breakup song from my first boyfriend at 17 ("Summertime Rolls" by Jane's Addiction) , I feel the echo of that sadness from that age, but it doesn't subsume me anymore. Like, songs are echos of memories and feelings I once felt intensely and when I hear certain ones now, I can hold those overwhelming emotions of the time at arm's length.
posted by Kitteh at 2:05 PM on April 26 [2 favorites]

For all of us that are forty plus, do you remember your parents at your age engaging in new music?

My dad (who used to drive a lot for his job) was basically a radio listener and never seemed to particularly driven to seek out music, went through a definite country music phase, an Appalachian phase, a kind of surprising (to me) Detroit techno phase, a bit into jazz for a while, a brief audiobooks phase, a period where he listened to conservative talk radio shows in order to get angry at them, back to country, etc.

My mom mostly listened to pop stuff on the radio when she drove. She definitely liked Michael Jackson and then Paula Abdul, but also Vangelis. The most eager I've seen her pursue new music was when I had happened to play some bellydance music in my car during a visit and she immediately wanted to know where she could find more of that.

Aside from the Beatles, the Moody Blues (and in my dad's case, early synth stuff and my mom's, Bobby Darrin) I've never known them to be particularly excited about music from "their" eras.
posted by Foosnark at 2:18 PM on April 26 [1 favorite]

I'm the oldest person at my job. We recently got a speaker set up at the shared desk where I work, and we can play music there (no swearing etc). I set up a Spotify account on it, with the hopes that I could get my young coworkers to add songs to the "liked" list and I would find out about new music from them.

Instead, I've found that they really like music from when I was their age and it's the really boring mainstream artists I couldn't stand the first time around, like Journey, Huey Lewis, and Billy Idol. I don't understand what's going on. I'm the one adding the weird stuff and the young people are adding "Girls Girls Girls."
posted by The corpse in the library at 2:20 PM on April 26 [4 favorites]

I've found streaming music incredible for finding new bands. Vastly easier than the old days. Just hit 'like' whenever you hear something you like that's new, and make sure that's going into a big list. Follow the wonderful tiny desk and KEXP youtube channels. When you find something that's interesting make a radio station out of it.
posted by Sebmojo at 2:30 PM on April 26 [1 favorite]

that said I've recently decided to just listen to albums, which feels daringly transgressive in 2024. put a cd (a cd!) in your car and let it go round until you're bored of it. Find a new song you like and play the album from beginning to end!

it's honestly a magical time to be a music lover, there are enough jeremaiads about it to be going on with, might as well enjoy what's good
posted by Sebmojo at 2:37 PM on April 26 [3 favorites]

College radio never graduates.
posted by waving at 2:37 PM on April 26 [2 favorites]

the more I think on it, yeah.. the difference in brain chemistry, the difference in neurons firing while you listen to the first songs you remember as a child, to how your brain anticipates sound structures as a teen, into young adulthood, to mature adulthood and into older age

there was a period when my Parent Gods played the music they played, and that was music to me

those first times you found "your own" and then the moment you approached things with "discernment"

and to someone's comment upthread: most people are indeed most people. it's funny, we're all little Ozymandiases in our own little way and our lasting monument is this laughable little assembly of songs and movies and books we thought were really cool. enjoy, but get over yourself, words to live by
posted by elkevelvet at 2:44 PM on April 26 [2 favorites]

If we're listing newish music that an officially old person is listening to (me, on the knifes edge of 40) then I'm game. If you want to be as cool as I am, you might be listening to:

- Sundial by Noname
- Wet Leg (self-titled), this album fucking rocks
- Stumpworks by Dry Cleaning
- Mood Swings by Marcus King
- Negro Swan by Blood Orange
- Never Enough by Daniel Caesar
- Wide Awake! by Parquet Courts

Maybe my favorite two albums from the past decade are the D'Angelo Black Messiah and Frank Ocean's Blonde. These are the ones off the top of my head.
posted by dis_integration at 2:49 PM on April 26 [3 favorites]

Wet Leg is definitely my favorite album of the last some-odd years. See also: Momma's Household Name and the most recent Sleater-Kinney.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 3:01 PM on April 26 [5 favorites]

For a lot of kids, listening to music is a social activity. You (plural) like some band or kind of music. You listen to it together when you hang out. You go to concerts together. It's what's on at parties. It's your secret handshake. You have to keep up and you want to keep up.

Yep. (generational) Music is the glue.
posted by mule98J at 3:14 PM on April 26 [3 favorites]

FWIW my parents let we know about new music they were listening to all the time and my dad still does. Did you know Faithless have a new album and it’s pretty good? Now you do.
posted by Artw at 3:25 PM on April 26 [1 favorite]

I think my pop music sensibilities did stall circa 1993 after a couple of decades of AM/FM radio + things like Solid Gold and Casey Kasems Top 40. My indie/alternative tastes solidified from 1986-2005. Then life happened and I didn't really get into much new music other than keeping up with releases from my favourite bands from previous years. I found that where I once had 20-30 albums from the NME end of year Best of List, I now had maybe 5-10. Now I rarely have anything from anyones Best of Lists - maybe 3-4 albums. Last 10 years I have been getting back into music thanks to things like bandcamp, variously back-filling things from the 50's - 80's I missed on the first run around (jazz, blues, soul, dub, reggae etc) + new things (doooooom, grind, world etc). Kind of wish I'd been less of a snob and more open to diverse things as a kid but on the other hand that stuff was hard to come buy where I grew up and an album cost a chunk of change so there wasn't the same drive to experiment and you tended to seek out fellow taste-makers (the 'High-Fidelity' trope rings true for a reason).

It is interesting to visit friends for whom music isn't necessarily such a big component of their lives and find they were still playing stuff from 30 years ago (but on an mp3/spotify bluetooth connected device rather than warbly C90) and hadn't updated to something similar but different in the same genre (but people have other priorities in their lives beside music).
posted by phigmov at 3:30 PM on April 26 [1 favorite]

I'm gonna love this thread forever, because I am always thrilled discovering new music! Even though I'm quite old, I am a working improvisational musician, so that helps I guess. I like the Beatles just fine, but how could you listen to them (much)--and other 60s/70s bands--55 years later?
posted by kozad at 4:54 PM on April 26 [2 favorites]

I came of music age back in the mid 70s. Had my cool Panasonic clock radio, with the time-delay knob and the flipping "digital" readout, (still have it and it still works), and would play your standard top 40s radio station every night when going to sleep. So I have all that material permanently etched in my head.

Then went to college in the early-mid 80s, and got introduced to new wave and such. U2, the English Beat, The Suburbs, Gang of Four, Devo, The Police, Talking Heads. Still enjoy those a ton.

Junior year, became a Deadhead.

Then in the 90's a parent of a child who was the same age as one of mine gave me some CDs. Pavement, OK Computer, Built to Spill, Wilco, etc. Took over my "new music" for many years.

Streaming in my car has shown me other bands I like, (Silver Jews, Whiskeytown, that one song from Guided By Voices I like, but I certainly don't seek out new music much. My youngest keeps telling me that if I were his age, I would fucking love Tame Impala...

That being said, he knows all the words to all the stuff I listen to in the car, so it works both ways I guess.
posted by Windopaene at 5:42 PM on April 26 [1 favorite]

I’ve been definitely feeling like I don’t listen to new music because I’m old. At work we have students rotating through my department and since we are a fairly informal workplace I’ve been asking each of them for a song or artist they’ve listened to recently that they like. I tell them no judgement and that I like a lot of kinds of music. I’ve gotten some really fun music to listen to on my drive to and from work out of this.

I am really enjoying listening to new things. I’ll be wandering through this thread to find more suggestions.
posted by sciencegeek at 5:44 PM on April 26 [1 favorite]

“ What makes you think human beings are sentient and aware? There's no evidence for it. Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told-and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their 'beliefs.' The reason is that beliefs guide behavior which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists.
Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion. Next question. “~Michael Crichton
(Book: The Lost World
posted by waving at 6:36 PM on April 26 [2 favorites]

You kids have no idea how important music used to be.
posted by whuppy at 7:01 PM on April 26 [5 favorites]

I love finding new music! I still like the stuff I liked when I was a teenager, but I hardly ever listen to most of it these days.

I once stumbled across a MeFi post on Japanese jazz, and it opened up a whole new world of music for me. Here's my current playlist of Japanese jazz favorites. I update it frequently.
posted by mikeand1 at 7:37 PM on April 26 [2 favorites]

The Stanford anthropologist Robert Sapolsky took a semi-serious look at this question about twenty years ago - there's an essay about it in one of his books from earlier this century.

And an NPR story about it from 2006.

He found that people stop acquiring new music around the age of 35.
posted by AsYouKnow Bob at 8:21 PM on April 26 [1 favorite]

Hey, waving, the misanthrope in me bows to the misanthrope in you:

"... man has always said, 'I reason; I am above the beasts because I reason.' And he has been very proud of himself because he could reason. It is the mark of his humanity. Being convinced that reason operates automatically within him he orders his life and his government upon emotion and superstition. He hates and fears and believes, not with reason but because he is told to by other men or by tradition. He does one thing and says another and his reason teaches him no difference between fact and falsehood. His bloodiest wars are fought for the merest whim – and that is why we did not give him weapons. His greatest follies appear to him the highest wisdom, his basest betrayals become noble acts – and this is why we could not teach him justice. We learned to reason. Man only learned to talk."

— Leigh Brackett
posted by concinnity at 8:44 PM on April 26 [4 favorites]

I admit I will forever be stuck in the '80s as my favorite era of music. I do listen to other eras of music, but the 80's is my default iff nothing else presents itself.

That said, I keep finding new stuff (sometimes it's actually from the current decade!) that is pretty dang good, so I give that a listen, too.

I'm 56, not dead. I hope I keep finding new stuff to listen to until the day I ... can't.

In another universe, I hope I'm one of those talent scout guys who goes out and finds new bands to listen to (like the birddogger in That Thing You Do).
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 9:52 PM on April 26 [1 favorite]

So many occurrences of "album" on this page! Other than as a product to be sold -- and then resold in chunks as singles -- I'm surprised albums even exist anymore. If I were in the music business, I think I'd want to put everything into one song at a time, from writing to releasing. After it's downloading, start working on putting out the next song, not the next album. You're always going to be doing something with more than one song at a time, but I'd want to record and release songs as soon as I finished them, not gather them up over a year or more and then release them all at once. But maybe that doesn't work well with the mundane business side of things, the project management end of the industry.
posted by pracowity at 12:48 AM on April 27 [1 favorite]

Haven't read the article yet but I have to share: my friend who is a bit of a music nerd has a great saying: "I don't have to like it to dig it." Which in regards to learning about new music and for example watching live performances (both on youtube and irl) of music you don't necessarily like or would ever listen is a GREAT way to broaden your knowledge about music and maybe even broaden your taste.
posted by fridgebuzz at 1:44 AM on April 27 [3 favorites]

Iggy Pop's radio show, Iggy Confidential, is one good way to hear songs you might not have heard before

Most of Sunday on 6 Music is great for music you haven't heard before - Cerys Matthews, Guy Garvey, Iggy and the Freak Zone later in the evening. For actual new releases they also have the daily new music show at 7pm. For a gen Xer I hear a lot of new music due to Radio 6!
posted by goo at 4:04 AM on April 27 [2 favorites]

- I'm surprised albums even exist anymore.

Like a good playlist some albums are greater as a whole then their constituent parts.
posted by Mitheral at 6:44 AM on April 27 [5 favorites]

My parents (born in '56 and '57) were very into music. My Dad loves prog rock and passed it onto me, but around 40 he got really into blue grass. My Mom (God rest her) gave me my first Nirvana cassette and told me I should check them out. She also gave me my first Soundgarden CD.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 7:45 AM on April 27 [1 favorite]

I've noticed over the years that musical tastes bond people longer than other shared tastes. It makes sense on some level to think that resonance, beats and frequencies influence the surging hormones within youth peer groups. (And I have no idea what this article is talking about).
posted by Brian B. at 7:57 AM on April 27 [1 favorite]

Albums as events seem to be making a little bit of a resurgence even, despite repeatedly being declared dead since the dawn of mp3s.
posted by Artw at 11:53 AM on April 27 [1 favorite]

Really listening to music takes more effort as I get older. I can have it on as background and dig it and not really think that much about what I heard or I can sit down and REALLY LISTEN. There isn't much in-between and I think it's this in-between space that, for me at least, shrinks as one gets older.

The last REALLY LISTEN music I've heard has been from Devon Townsend. It really brought back that thrilling feeling of discovering something new and so awesome that you have to tell everyone about it (as I am now) that I associate with my youth.

Then there's the Very Serious category of listening, which takes the most attention and I reserve for the times when my soul calls out for it -- classical, avant-garde, experimental, etc. But that's like going to a fine arts museum. A great way to spend some time and be enriched, but you're not going to casually decorate your bedroom room with what you see there
posted by treepour at 12:57 PM on April 27 [2 favorites]

If I were in the music business, I think I'd want to put everything into one song at a time, from writing to releasing.

If you're in a set up that requires coordinating several people in the same place at the same time or using a studio to record (which yes, I know, a lot of modern music is characterised by the absence of those things) then batch-producing your songs is a more natural workflow anyway, which lends itself to albums/EPs as a release format.

(I feel like the EP - as a mini album, not as a single with a collection of bad club mixes - is a much more common thing now in the download era than in the decades preceding it?)
posted by Dysk at 3:13 PM on April 27 [1 favorite]

in the finding new music by an older artist department: I went to see Gary Numan and Ministry recently. Of course, Ministry was awesome, but Gary Numan really killed it too. I went to spotify to listen to his more recent stuff and holy. shit. The album he put out in 2018 Savage Songs from a broken world is fantastic. He has a more recent one, that I haven't even gotten to yet because I got stuck on this one. it's all epic dramatic catchy gothy atmosphere. love it.
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 7:35 PM on April 27 [4 favorites]

As a 50 year old I would perhaps argue I am still very much discovering new artists, but preferentially those that reflect the genres and subgenres of music I discovered in my teens and twenties.
posted by piyushnz at 10:10 PM on April 27 [5 favorites]

I'm 71 and I listen to new music every day. I was a rock 'n' roll and folkie kid (saw the Rolling Stones at 11 Buffalo Springfield at 15 and Jimi Hendrix at 16) and was constantly seeking new music. In college I branched out to classical music that was new to me. Then in the early 80s I fell in love with reggae and went on the hunt for old and new reggae and ended up with so many records that I became a reggae deejay. I retired from deejaying in 2007 and went on a rampage of listening to everything I'd missed during my reggae years. I "discovered" grunge and fell in love and liked a lot of indie and alt music too. I worked with a bunch of metal musicians and went down that rabbit hole and am still down there.
posted by a humble nudibranch at 1:47 PM on April 28 [5 favorites]

I feel like there's two related but ultimately kind of separate concerns that the article mixes together:

• Do I listen to less new music than I did when I was younger?
• Do I listen to less new-to-me music than I did when I was younger?

In that first part, there's a lot of related questions having to do with whatever's popular or mainstream. But I'm way more interested in the second part.

To be fair, I know a lot of people who would answer yes to both questions. Friends of mine who used to be super into particular music scenes or genres have since stopped following new music completely, and as such live in a bubble where when they do think of music, they reach back to that earlier age almost exclusively. But as people in this thread have shown, it's quite possible to continue expanding your musical horizons and discover new artists that nevertheless aren't new or popular. I went through a phase where I was listening to a lot of jazz-funk-fusion-y tracks from the 70s; that stuff was new to me, but not in any way new.

Alternatively, it's quite possible to be listening to a lot of "new" music that closely mirrors stuff from your childhood. I do this a lot too, now that the music of my teenage years is old enough to see a revival with younger bands and artists taking up the form. If I listened to a lot of soccer mommy, does that mean I'm great at finding new music, or just good at finding new examples of genres I've listened to all my life? In other words, is recency really the metric we care about, or genre drift? Do I listen to a lot of music that's significantly different from what I used to listen to, or significantly similar? And what are the implications of my answer?
posted by chrominance at 4:40 PM on April 28 [3 favorites]

Like a good playlist some albums are greater as a whole then their constituent parts.

That's true, but it's also true that a lot of albums are just one great single packed carefully in filler for shipping.
posted by pracowity at 8:37 AM on April 29 [2 favorites]

Just about all day I’ve had music in my head from the French pop music bracket contest my kid’s school participates in. All 2023 I believe. “Matin, midi, soir…” Delightful stuff.
posted by eirias at 2:51 PM on April 29 [1 favorite]

The first records I remember liking were a stack of 45s that my older brother and sister had picked up in the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, so I was totally into songs like "Family Affair" (Sly and the Family Stone), "I Want You Back" (The Jackson 5), "House of the Rising Sun" (The Animals), "Theme From Shaft" (Isaac Hayes), and of course various Beatles songs. I probably completely wore out Beatles '65 and Magical Mystery Tour, which for some reason were the only Beatles albums within reach of my horrible little hands and my horrible little plastic record player. I loved it all, even the schlock ("Cause we love you... Mister Moonlight" - cue cheesy organ).
posted by pracowity at 8:12 AM on April 30 [1 favorite]

WHY IS THERE NOT MORE GOTH FOR AND BY OLD PEOPLE. WHY DO ONLY YOUNG PEOPLE MOAN ABOUT DEATH. GOTH SHOULD BECOME MORE INTENSE AS YOU APPROACH THE GRAVE, NOT LESS. WHAT THE FUCK

have you been to a goth club lately?

it's literally the exact same people there as twenty years ago, and none of us are getting any younger
posted by automatronic at 5:44 AM on May 1 [8 favorites]

LOL, I went to see Sisters of Mercy years ago in Atlanta and it was all the Goths coming out of their middle-aged crypts (I was still in my late 20s) and it was great! Now I AM the middle-aged Goth at those shows.
posted by Kitteh at 6:13 AM on May 1 [1 favorite]

In my 50s, I was in a store and heard Eva Cassidy. Definitely in the style of under-produced singers of my youth, but she stopped my in my tracks, I do return to the music I grew up with, but only the best of it; leaving behind a lot of not very good stuff, I hope. I'd love to hear some under-produced Taylor Swift - maybe I'd like it.

What new music, or music of this millennium, should I be listening to? I don't expect an answer this late to the thread, but I'm a geezer and can't be arsed. So, that's the answer.
posted by theora55 at 6:59 PM on May 1 [1 favorite]

have you been to a goth club lately?

Do...do they exist?
posted by mittens at 6:15 AM on May 2 [2 favorites]

mittens, I don't even hear about Goth nights anymore at large city clubs, much less Goth exclusively clubs. But if I were to put money on where a Goth club might still exist, I would say LA or SF.
posted by Kitteh at 7:25 AM on May 2 [2 favorites]

Slimelight's still going in London.
posted by kyrademon at 10:33 AM on May 2 [1 favorite]

> have you been to a goth club lately?

> Do...do they exist?

Last I heard the Senator and the Shoe Licker are still showing up to the Castle in Tampa, but then again Tampa is, strangely, a kind of Goth capital. You might think the central florida climate would be a goth repellant, but you have to account for the absolutely cursed vibes of growing up in Tampa. The sun might be shining but it only does that because it wants you dead.
posted by dis_integration at 7:16 AM on May 3 [1 favorite]

Florida has always had a healthy Goth scene! Orlando used to be another hotspot too.
posted by Kitteh at 7:19 AM on May 3

You are not currently logged in. Log in or create a new account to post comments.