You must log in or # to comment.
My music taste is like the inverse of this graph.
“How people who only ever listen to the music that’s played on the radio feel about music”
This may be true for casual listeners but it fails miserably for people who are “into music”.
Yeah this is almost exactly upside down for me. Most of my favorite music is from before I was born, and as I’ve gotten older I’ve only gotten more into new music.
What are your current favorites from the old and new categories?
Old stuff I’m partial to classic prog rock and jazz fusion (Yes, Chic Corea, Frank Zappa, etc.). New stuff is kinda all over the place, but the more genre bending the more likely I am to like it (black midi, KGatLW, The Comet is Coming, etc).
i’m not. it definitely applies to me. and i’m guessing it would for the majority of the public, too.
That could easily be extended to other interest areas;
The average person may exclusively eat local, contemporary foods (ie whatever everyone else in their community eats), while “foodies” go out of their way to find new and interesting flavors.
For many people, fashion is, “whatever looks kinda like what everyone else is wearing.” For “fashionistas”, there’s a whole language around clothing choices.
But it’s better to share some actual joyful experiences.
I recently started listening to “Angine de Poitrine”. They’re a modern band that just released a new album and still plays live concerts. According to the OP chart, they’re 15 years too new for me.
For some old stuff, check out Hillery Hahn. I keep going back to her Bach sonatas and he lived in the 15th and 16th centuries.
Then there are crazy fusion versions. I recently found Ben Comeau’s gem “Donald Trump is a Wanker”. He took the bassline of “Seven Nation Army”, gave it a choral voice, and transcribed it to a fugue format. To paraphrase an other contemporary artist; that shit is bananas.
Bro I smashed the shit out the like button for angine de poitirne, and I don’t even think they’re human. How do I have nostalgia bias for music that isn’t from this dimension?
they’re an industry plant its the olsen twins
look into it
Investigate 311 bro
Source?
They are fire
I’m right there with you.
I bet it was for you what it was for me…part “this is crazy unique”, part “AI can never do this” and “that’s a musical scratch for an itch I never knew I had”.
And ADHD and a gentle kiss of the 'tism.
i find a lot of music i used to think was hot shit back in my heyday is Very Dated now, would not generally recommend
I thought about trying this, but thinking about how to execute it already sounds painful enough.
For input data, I could use my existing library of mostly individually-selected songs, currently at size 1,662. Since I mostly listen to everything, this spans a rather large range of dates.
Then start taking random songs, and rating them on 1 - 10 scale in relation to entire library, enter ratings into 10 year buckets, and use mean of those ratings.
Probably 5 ratings per bucket to keep it short.
Unfortunately, I most likely can’t fill every bucket, hell, some would remain empty. After all, classical music makes my library likely start in late 1600s, and end in 2025.
I didn’t think about that. Perhaps I could leave it out, and start at, say 1920s, but that would make the data incomplete.Problem is, I don’t have the years for most of them, so that would mean looking up release dates for those individually.
Huh, what if everyone would absolutely love (old) classical music, but we don’t see a spike as the graph starts at age of -40?
I’m making an effort to listen to newer music by swapping albums with colleagues of younger generations (in return I get them to try records I’d just have assumed everyone has already heard). I like a lot of their recommendations but I don’t know if anything’s really going to stick. Maybe though!
Time is a very good filter of what’s worthy and what’s not. You’re living now and you’re witnessing good stuff, but you’re also witnessing bullshit before it’s had the chance of being forgotten. If you look back 40-50-60 years, will you think of The Beatles, ABBA, Freddie Mercury, Jimi Hendrix, or will you think of someone who maybe released a couple of songs or an album and dropped out of existence? Yes, I thought so.
What, you mean you don’t still rock out to the Newbeats?
I still find good music, but not nearly at the same frequency I did in the late 90s to early 2010s. Absolutely none of what I find good is played on the radio (but then, it’s like 80% commercials so I doubt much of anything is heard on the radio unless used in an ad); it’s all from films, games and memes now. A lot of artists I am into these days aren’t even known outside of Bandcamp, Spotify or TikTok where they post their music.
Nostalgia needs to go back to its old status as a form of mental illness.
Good and bad music exist since the existence of music. The problem with bad music began from the music industry massified it with criteria more commercial than artistic, this is why good music did not cease to exist, but you have to look for it more than before. Whether you like it or not depends only on personal taste, not on type or style.
I love songs from 2008 and I love songs from 2026, Idk where this came from
this is nowhere near enough data to make a real conclusion. there is no causal link explained here, merely a correlation. my anecdotal experience is that i now hate the music i listened to as a teen (RATM and SOAD mostly, with some nine inch nails etc. thrown in), my absolute favorite band was Thee Oh Sees for a while in my 20s, and now i’m almost exclusively into electronic music like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jn1Br5Zf6Xs&t=1503s
very hard graph to follow but “popular music” means highest rated radio pop station. Nothing alternative.
I wonder if there is any noticeable difference between different generations to this graph. Like if there is a specific time-frame, that if we account for nostalgia and calculate out this bias/distribute different generations evenly performs higher than other time frames
I was curious too so I pulled up the study.
First off, this is a marketing paper aimed at companies trying inform the industry about taste demographics.
Secondly, I think it’s relevant to note they selected sample songs from billboard top ten (excluding the top 3) so the data is definitely only speaking to ‘an average of average taste in billboard pop music’ and not to musical taste overall. Edit: Also limited to US.
This is the bit that I think gets at our question:
Peak Preference in SSA indicates the peak preference of each respondent based on their birth year, so if you were born in 1970 and the testing showed you favoring the 1990 song Vogue- Madonna as your peak preference, your SSA would be 20 (you favor music from when you were 20).
My impression from this scatter chart is that a lot of people liked 80s music regardless of when they were born haha.
