Soundtracks of our lives: How age shapes musical preferences

Music has been a very intimate part of life, shrouded in memory, mood, and milestone. Now, an international team of scientists has followed the way people listen over a lifetime—and the results reveal a soundtrack that changes with every stage of life.

The study, "Soundtracks of Our Lives: How Age Shapes Musical Tastes," analyzed 15 years of information from more than 42,000 Last.fm users, which is a service that tracks people's songs listened to on sites like Spotify. The study tested more than 542 million listens to more than one million songs from 2005 to 2020. It is among the biggest studies to date of how music taste changes over a lifetime.

The numbers confirm what many have found: teens and young adults play more music than anyone and seek it out relentlessly. Playcounts—numbers of songs one plays on a yearly basis—spike in their teens and peak at about age 19, when the average listener streams approximately 2,300 songs annually. To compare, playcounts dwindle to below 600 songs annually once one attains age 58.

It's not just the number that's varied. People in their 22nd year of life are listening to more than 800 new single songs every year, twice as much music as they listen to during their fifties. Artist discovery also rises steadily from the late thirties to a median of 211 before falling off in middle life.

You want to do it all when you're young," says Alan Said, an associate professor of computer science at Gothenburg University and one of the researchers taking part in the research. "You don't attend a music festival because you want to listen to a particular band, but by the time you're older, you've often developed a musical genre that you're a part of. You're not as concerned about the charts."

Teenagers' music preferences are ubiquitous. Some dive into diverse playlists, while others remain loyal to a handful of favorite artists. As people reach adulthood, those inconsistencies smooth out. Listeners have more consistent habits by age forty, with more styles and songs than in adolescence but without the unpredictability of adolescence.

This shift can be measured in diversity scores, or the extent to which listeners spread their attention between artists and songs. Average diversity score is around 0.31 at age 15 and rises to near 0.60 by age 40. Listening, even if less frenzied now, is more distributed and varied.

Perhaps the strongest determinant of musical taste in late life is nostalgia. The study used a metric called "song-specific age" to track how individuals respond to music released during their young adult years. The results showed clear peaks when the release year of a work fell during the teenager or young adult period of a listener.

This is why people in their fifties like to split their playlists between new releases and their music from the time they were teenagers. "Most 65-year-olds don't take a holiday of discovery about music," Said said. "But they do return to the music which characterised their teenage years."

Nostalgia also gets the taste of older listeners more distinct. Teenagers are likely to have some song preferences in common with their peers, but by middle age there's much less chance that you and the neighbor next door are going to be drawn to the same bands. You may accept death metal on your word of honor and they Genesis or reggae.

These findings pose new challenges for music streaming services like Spotify and YouTube. Most music recommendation systems assume that the taste of a listener does not change over time. The study shows that that's not the case.

Youth can be assisted by suggestions that blend new fresh hits with recommendations of earlier songs they never listened to," Said added. "Middle-aged audiences prefer a blend of the new and the old, but older adults prefer more personalized suggestions relying on their own preferences and nostalgia.".

The article talks about so-called "algorithmic feedback loops." Because young people surf in general, algorithms offer them eclectic suggestions. With maturity, as listeners become specialists in their tastes, recommendation machines blow these more specific tastes out of proportion, discovery further constrained, goes the model. To prevent this, Said and his co-authors recommend that recommendation machines become more dynamic, not merely responding to a listener's listening history but to the listener's life stage.

Several reservations to the research. The sample skewed towards users in 2013 and 2014, and age information was not always reliable. Older music was also not represented, possibly confusing conclusions about long-term action. But the research provides one of the clearest images so far of how music is with you throughout life.

From questioning adolescence to middle-aged walk-down-memory-lanes, music is a life-long friend. It grows up with you, a picture not only of who you are, but of who you once were. The stats will provide you the stats, but the stories get played every time you press play.

This research has the potential to change the way streaming companies connect with their users. By linking suggestions to events in people's lives, music services could appeal to and satisfy individuals better. With youth, that would mean showing them new popular songs and enabling discovery.

Middle-aged listeners could have services balance discovery and music from their younger years. Older adults could be provided with nostalgia-tinged playlists that enable music to continue as a means of maintaining a connection to the past and the current.

Beyond amusement, such results can even inform music therapy interventions, enhancing memory and well-being in older adults.

Study was conducted by researchers at the University of Gothenburg, Jönköping University, and the University of Primorska. Research findings are available online in the journal ACM Digital Library.

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