Btw Psychology Today has an interesting article on the music issue. Here’s part of it:
“ As I’ve grown older, I’ve often heard people my age say things like “today’s music [censored]” or “they just don’t make good music like they used to.”
So, what is it with old people and new music?
Older People Really Don’t Like New Music
We know that musical tastes begin to solidify as early as age 13 or 14, and that they get locked into place pretty firmly in our early 20s. Studies indicate that most of us stop exploring new music entirely by the time we turn 33, and if a song was released when you are in your early teens, that song is likely to remain quite popular among your age group throughout your life.
Curiously, men are even less likely than women to explore new music and listen to new artists as they get older.
Why does this happen?
For starters, there is evidence that the brain’s ability to make subtle distinctions between different chords and other musical elements gets worse with age, so new, unfamiliar songs may in fact sound more alike to older ears than to younger ears.
But I believe that the aversion that older people often have to new music also has a simpler explanation.
The Mere Exposure Effect
One of the most reliable laws of social psychology is something called the mere exposure effect. In a nutshell, this means that within certain limits, the more familiar we are with something and the more often we are exposed to it, the more we tend to like it. This works for other people, consumer products, and yes, even for songs.
When you are in your early teens, you probably spend a lot of time listening to music, discussing it with your friends, and watching music videos. The songs and artists who are popular during this time become familiar, comforting parts of your life.
For most people over 30, life is too busy to allocate much attention to discovering new music. Advancing one’s career and raising a family eats up most of the available time, and so we tend to listen to comforting old favorites that connect us to a simpler time and place. And with familiar songs, we can fill in words and sounds that elude us even when there is a lot of background noise or other factors that prevent us from hearing the song clearly.
Consequently, we prefer familiar music, and it is the music that we hear when we are young that is most familiar to us.“
I’m a lot older than you, but as a musician of sorts myself, I’ve never understood how people get stuck in the music of their youth and can’t appreciate new music. If I see a profile in OLD that states their musical preference as classic rock, I pass them by. I’m not looking for a man whose mind is closed, resistant to change and stuck in the past. And that’s what that says to me. Yes, there was great music in my youth in the 60’s and 70’s (which our parents labeled degenerate) but there’s plenty of great music being made now too. Go find it.
