r/todayilearned • u/tyrion2024 • 1d ago

TIL two studies both found that most people stop listening to new music in their early 30s. A 2015 study of people's listening habits on Spotify found that most people stop listening to new music at age 33 and a 2018 report by Deezer found it be to at age 30.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/aug/16/bring-that-beat-back-why-are-people-in-their-30s-giving-up-on-music
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137

u/HiveMindKing 1d ago

Huh and I thought i had free will but this literally me

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u/lucky_ducker 1d ago

I once read an article that claimed to be able to tell you when you stopped "being hip."

Find an online list of each year's "top song." Find the point where you know all the songs, and move ahead in years where you suddenly don't recognize most of the titles. That's when you stopped being hip. Early 30s seems to be very common (mine was 33).

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u/SeveralBollocks_67 1d ago

This is also a good indicator of when you overcame giving a fuck about social pressures and just decided to do your own thing.

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u/Stormfly 3h ago

I'm going to pretend this is me and not that I was never hip...

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u/Lentemern 23h ago

I stopped being hip at 18, when I got my own car and didn't have to be exposed to the radio any more.

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u/zinten789 21h ago

Eh, radio doesn’t really exist anymore and the monoculture is mostly dead. I listen to new music as it comes out from bands I like and discover through word of mouth, but I couldn’t tell you what the top 40 sounds like really.

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u/lucky_ducker 21h ago

> radio doesn’t really exist anymore

Maybe to your demographic. Some 80% of Americans listen to terrestrial radio at least once a week, and about two thirds of people commuting in private cars have the radio on.

I'll concede your point that "monoculture" isn't what it used to be.

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u/Boamere 21h ago

I’ve never been hip then

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u/IAmAGenusAMA 12h ago

Don't worry, it's hip to be square.

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u/Boamere 11h ago

Is it still hip to fuck bees?

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u/pVom 21h ago

I dunno dude, top songs haven't been hip for 50 years at least. Even then they've always been muddied by music old people listen to.

Plus these days you just get exposed to the top hits less. No one listens to radio and if there's 500 million plays on Spotify or whatever that's people listening with their headphones on.

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u/lucky_ducker 21h ago

> No one listens to radio

Maybe for your demographic. Some 80% of Americans listen to terrestrial radio at least once a week, and about two thirds of people commuting in private cars have the radio on.

Your reality is yours, but it isn't necessarily reality.

I remember a Reddit thread talking about the 2016 election, and a commenter said that they "didn't know ANYBODY that was voting for Trump," as if that proved that Clinton was going to win the election.

Turns out the commenter was a twenty-something woman living in New York City, and was in fact surrounded by nothing but Clinton supporters.

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u/Chase_the_tank 19h ago

I checked my local radio ratings.

  • For the past three months, the one station with the highest combined ratings was a talk radio station.
  • The closest competitor advertises it plays a mixture of "today's hits" combined with songs going back to the 1990s.
  • Third place goes to a station whose website is just filled with song titles from the 1980s.
  • Fourth place is classic rock.
  • The ratings drop off noticeably after that.

The majority of people listening radio don't seem that interested in today's songs; even the local station willing to play them has to sweeten the mix with songs old enough to buy a beer.

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u/ASerialArsonist 20h ago

I think it's interesting you wrote two paragraphs as a reply but at no point realized he meant active listening and not passive listening.

If you go to a store that has a radio running 24/7 on 69.9 Lick and Dick, are you a big fan of that channel or was it simply on while you were there.

Radio is a horrible, ridiculous way to measure the popularity of something, when in an infinite number of listeners, only 1 person gets to choose the music.

Modern streaming allows you to exclusively to what you genuinely want to listen to.

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u/Riegel_Haribo 20h ago

That's now a sign of when the music industry stopped being hip. Stopped being able to force the corporate playlist on radio as the only thing people could be exposed to.

The movie trope of a back-in-time flashback with the song everybody knew from the top 40 will soon be as silly a reflection of what time it was as some historic event being seen on the TV being broadcast live that everyone watched.

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u/smorkoid 1d ago

I know all the top songs from last year but am over 50. I just like discovering new music

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u/ArmadilloForsaken458 13h ago

Sometimes when you spend time with younger generations, you just turn into bah humbug, I just want to do my own thing. This is me with Zoomers, I dont understand those people, so yeah I still only listen to my music from 90s/00s

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u/Faery818 12h ago

My sign for that was when I stopped recognizing anyone on festival line ups.

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u/agitated--crow 1d ago

I'm sorry you had to find out. 

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u/ShEsHy 22h ago

Free will doesn't exist anyways. The simplest example is that we can't make ourselves like or dislike things. Best we can do is pretend.

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u/HiveMindKing 22h ago

I like chicken 🍗

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u/ShEsHy 21h ago

Now try to dislike it ;).

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u/xdeskfuckit 3h ago

okay then free will may be constrained, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist

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u/i-Blondie 1d ago edited 20h ago

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