As people get older, they listen to less hot music: the "Coolness Spiral of Death"

boing
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I think that’s a large part of it. I don’t care about the mainstream, in fact the amount of it I am exposed to makes me want to hear it less. There is nothing “hot” about it.

Instead I’m off digging up experimental electronic music, late 80s /early 90s industrial (is that “oldies?”), dark ambient, symphonic metal, or whatever sounds interesting at the time. It’s a rare week when I’m not listening to at least one album from an artist I’ve never heard of before.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve gotten to be much more adventurous about food and farther left politically. I’ve always read SF/Fantasy and a smattering of non fiction though.

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Also: the desperate need to fit in, impress your peers by looking cool and ‘in the know’, define your own generation’s identity and culture by distancing yourself from from the stuff your parents liked, and feeling like you have infinite free time to invest in pop culture? All that is supposed to fade away after your twenties.

Or maybe it doesn’t, but eventually you will find yourself an aging hipster. Which is a sad thing to be.

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Alternate Post Title:

Youngs Are Idiots. Olds, Less So.

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I wonder how this spiral moves through the ages. I’m in my 20s’and I’ve noticed that music has been coming out at a faster pace in a bigger multitude of genres. The amount of subgenres I’ve listened to these days is growing every year at a decent rate of 4 new subgenres yearly on average. I can’t keep up with all genres at the same time so I have to divide attention to them. These genres are certainly not according to the ‘median of popularity’ so that would explain that outward spiral at the start of the 20’s.

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Music is a really interesting cultural phenomenon, as it’s uniquely human and has a long history. As a species, there’s a long interest and history in music.

I’m not convinced that all people enjoy it the same way, though, and I think many are happy to take a passive view with music. Very roughly, I think of music enjoyment in 3 tiers:

You hear it
You really listen to it, and keep exploring
You make it

The first are “most” people and are people who take a passive approach. This is people who just turn on the radio, listen to the latest popular songs, and may not own any music. Or, if they do own music, it’s singles of pop songs and if they create playlists, they’re essentially the same as listening to the radio.

The second are people who generally like obscure bands, where obscure means “can’t hear it on the radio.” It’s a sizable bunch, and there are a range of people here. Some continue to search out new, obscure music as they age. Others end up transitioning more to the first group of people, and just listen to the same obscure bands which, over time, become less obscure.

The third are those who like music so much they have to make it. Not all make it professionally, of course, and some people make music but don’t really look for obscure music. However, those who make music tend to hear “something else” in music that they listen to.

Anyway, hardly scientific, but it’s neat to think about how something so fundamental to humanity (in my opinion) affects people in different ways.

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Am I the only one who is going to mention that there is no reason for this chart to be a spiral. A regular old plot of popularity rank vs. age would show all of the same “conclusions” and might be easier to read. However, that would not lend itself to the “coolness spiral of death” and “age out” metaphor.

If you can prove to me that when I pass age 50 I will be transformed back into a 15 year old, then please ignore my earlier comments about the circular chart.

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It seems to me, as an ancient, that if the quality of music being produced at any particular time stays constant, then as one ages one is going to hear fewer and fewer tunes that match the quality of the ones that have been heard and retained in memory. Why seek out new music if less and less of it is better than what one has liked already?

What’s more, if I have a lifetime’s collection of vinyl, tape, CDs, MP3s, pianola rolls or whatever, why should I be seeking new sounds anyway? Is it bad that I like the old stuff that I liked when I wore a younger man’s clothes?

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Also, older people have a wider taste in food, in reading and probably most anything else. Could it be because they’ve tried different things and aren’t so hung up on what it is being constantly marketed directly to them because they don’t give a crap anymore?

That said, I do have a playlist called “Party like it’s 1989”. Fun to dance to AND drive the kids crazy!!

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What a silly game with statistics. As people get older, “hot” music represents an increasingly diminishing percentage of the music they have been exposed to and developed an affinity for. Of course they listen to less of it.

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Teens on music, fashion, books, and movies:

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I must fall into to ‘the keep on exploring’ music category since I can’t play to save my life. I don’t care much what Spotify has to say. Even though I have an account, I don’t use it. I’ve found some other services that I prefer much better.

The age of 50 is a long ago dot in my rearview, but I keep seeking out and listening to new music. And I’ve learned that just because it is “hot” doesn’t mean it’s good. I go through the UK and Dutch top 40 singles on a regular basis and pick out what sounds good to me. I download the SXSW torrent every year and pick out what I like ( and boy, do you ever get familiar with music formulas when you hear a couple hundred submissions each in a handful of genres). I have a broad and eclectic taste in music that keeps me seeking new and different sounds that intrigue me like electronica, dub, ambient, ethnic, and world fusion. But I still enjoy the oldies…you know Bach, Beethoven, Mozart. And the newer guys like Hank Williams and Carl Perkins.

As an added bonus, I have a nine year kid who doesn’t listen to pop music on the radio. His favorite radio shows right now are “Thistle & Shamrock” and an old timey music hour playing country music from the 1920’s and 30’s.

So, after all that blather, I wonder if the audience of Spotify is self selecting to be the type that fits the fossilizing older person who tunes out newer music in favor of the old and familiar tunes.

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I don’t really like much of the music that was popular in my teens (90s). I tend to listen to stuff that was popular (often way) before I was born, or from the last decade. Even more recent stuff that I enjoy wouldn’t be the most popular music nowadays, which doesn’t mean that I haven’t listened to popular music; it just means that I don’t personally rate a lot of it very highly.

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Am I the only person who sees the continent of Antarctica in that graph?

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Back OT, one of my daughters and I have an unacknowledged game of finding interesting music that the other hasn’t heard yet. Sometimes I introduce music to her (which is always, “eww, you like that?”, and then a year later “I discovered this”…sigh) and sometimes she’s the source of something new and wonderful. It’s a two-way street. Isn’t that how music appreciation should be?

A local radio station, while still pretty good, used to be stellar, and one of the reasons was that it would play literally any genre after any other genre. When the clock radio went off in the morning, I might be listening to an aria, followed by heavy metal, followed by a central European folk song in the original language, followed by what we would now call Classic Rock. I recreate that effect now with my phone, which is set on “shuffle” for the entire music library. I highly recommend it!

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Available as a shirt! That overlap between “music I like” and “music I used to like” seems designed as a pedant magnet. Vennlitists, as it were.

And the video just makes me want to rewatch this old favorite. I must be getting old.

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40+, still buy new music, don’t have much use for Spotify. I’ve tried it. It’s ok, but I like to own my stuff. Also, once I became a parent, disposable income for music was not as much of a priority. So I see two things going on here, “Olds” are not the Spotify demographic, and “Olds” lose interest in newer music when they have to focus on the care and feeding of new little people. That said, my 19 year old and I share an iTunes account and I’m turning him on to at least as much new stuff as he’s shared with me.

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I guess this graph doesn’t take into account the musical tastes of the hipster population. If that’s the case, the graph would be spinning inward.

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This appeared on AV Club a couple of weeks ago. I put it on Facebook, where I admitted that it pretty well describes me. Not so much that I stick with the music of my youth – I generally don’t – but that there’s a long tail (I guess?) of 100 years’ worth of recorded music that I’ve still never heard, and I dig into that (well, mostly jazz) at the expense of keeping up with what’s hip/trendy. But a couple of friends who are older than myself/younger than my parents loudly protested about the chart.

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Yeah, teen years was rock/pop till I got to college and the college radio which played a lot of punk, and more esoteric stuff which was awesome. Then I started properly listening to Jazz. Lately I have been digging into Electronica/EDM and studio/library music but really nothing that is on the pop charts outside of things that make it to KEXP and the pop charts as well.

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