What\u2019s your favorite song? Maybe it\u2019s a classic, maybe it\u2019s a forgotten B-side, a love song, a musical number, or something else. It is often said that it\u2019s something we listened to as teenagers that we link to the strong emotions of those years. There might be truth to that, or at least we become less adventurous when we grow older.<\/p>\n
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Researchers from several universities worked together to understand the relationship we have with music<\/a> and how that changes with age. They looked at 40,000 users from music service Last.fm over the course of 15 years. The dataset contained over 1 million different songs, which have been played over 542 million times.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the study, we can follow how music listening changes over a longer period of time. When companies like Spotify try to develop music recommendations for their customers, they don\u2019t necessarily look at listening habits throughout users\u2019 lives,\u201d study’s co-author Alan Said, associate professor of computer science at the University of Gothenburg, said in a statement<\/a>.<\/p>\n The data shows that teenagers listen to a wide variety of popular music, and that listening habits expand to consider more genres and artists in the transition from adolescence to adulthood. But as we grow older, that spectrum shrinks, creating a peculiar duality. The older user listens to new music in their favorite genres, but nostalgia<\/a> becomes a crucial driving force. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you’re young, you want to experience everything. You don’t go to a music festival just to listen to one particular band, but when you become an adult, you’ve usually found a style of music that you identify with. The charts become less important,\u201d explained Said. \u201cMost 65-year-olds don’t embark on a musical exploration journey.\u201d<\/p>\n A fascinating aspect of this research was the fact that older people’s listening habits were quite unique compared to those of teenagers. A younger person’s playlist will have many songs that are shared among their peer group. For the over-65s, the field is narrower but more unique.<\/p>\n