Listening to music is regularly part of many people, but the music to which you traveled can have more to do with your age than you think. A new study, presented at the Association for Computing Machinery Association, revealed that our relationship with music changes spectacularly as we age.
The study analyzed a huge set of data from the Last.FM music sharing service, which allows users to link popular streaming applications like Spotify and follow their listening habits. The researchers examined more than 40,000 people of listening to individuals over a period of 15 years and were able to map how musical tastes evolve during his life.
“When you are young, you want to discover everything. You are not going to a music festival just to listen to a particular group, but when you become an adult, you have generally found a music style with which you identify. The graphics become less important,” said Alan, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Gothhenburg, in a press release.
Learn more: How does music have an impact on your brain and workflow?
How does our taste for music change with age?
The results confirm something that many of us already suspect. When we are young, our relationship with music is social and motivated by trends. Adolescents and young adults consume a wide variety of genres, continue the last successes and bind with friends on shared reading lists.
However, the transition to adulthood marks a turning point in listening habits. For those in their twenties and thirties, the reading lists diversified even more, many people experimenting in genres and artists. But over the years, this musical experimentation is starting to decrease.
At the average age, nostalgia begins to play a more important role in music that people listen to. Songs that remind us of our youth become the soundtrack of the subsequent stages of life and help us anchor in these associated memories.
All this does not mean that the elderly stop engaging with new music. Instead, they are developing a scheme of returning to these young classics and sometimes branching into a new musical territory. As people age, their musical taste no longer only becomes theirs, and it becomes more difficult to find overlap between the songs and the favorite groups of people.
How science can help music streaming
For giants in streaming like Spotify and Apple Music, these results could have implications for the way they recommend music in the future. Recommendation systems are based strongly on algorithms designed to anticipate user preferences. But if listening habits move so dramatically during his life, these algorithms may not be able to follow.
“A service that recommends the same type of music in the same way to everyone may miss what the different groups really want,” said the press release. “The youngest listeners can benefit from recommendations that mix the last successes with suggestions for older music they have not yet discovered. Middle Age listeners appreciate a balance between new and familiar, while older listeners want more personalized recommendations that reflect their personal tastes and nostalgic reminiscences. “
Overall, this study underlines how music is not only entertainment, but is part of our changing identity. Our reading lists evolve like us, reflecting the cultural trends with which we have grown up, the personal experiences that have shaped us and nostalgia that comforts us later in life.
Learn more: Nostalgia and reflection on the past help us to keep our friendships
Article Sources
Our Discovermagazine.com writers use studies evaluated by high -quality peers and sources for our articles, and our publishers examine scientific precision and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
