I recently appeared on the Audio Unleashed podcast to complain. Okay, that wasn’t the only reason, but my segment started out as a rant about how whenever people talk about popular music it inevitably devolves into explaining how much they dislike Taylor Swift. Hosts Dennis Burger and Brent Butterworth objected to my reductive complaint, which was fine, because what I really wanted to talk about was something else, something that endlessly fascinates me: Do music tastes change as we age? Do our tastes, especially our favorites, get solidified in our teens or early 20s? Is there a sort of “Era of Discovery” early on that sets our tastes in stone for the rest of our lives?
To some extent, this early solidification seems pretty likely for most people. How many of us still listen to the same bands, or at least the same genres, we fell in love with in our formative years? Like most things to do with how we age and discover things we like and don’t like, the specifics are complex. I couldn’t hope to come up with a definitive answer (if there even is one) without a lot of research and countless surveys.
Nonetheless, I did a little research and one survey. I love talking about this topic, and the addition of some actual data, anecdotal though it may be, seemed like a great tie-in to the discussion on the podcast. Recently, several SoundStage! contributors have posted about their favorite albums, so the boomer and Gen X demographics have been well covered. I wanted to see what a younger demographic was listening to. By 30(ish), most people will have some entrenched tastes and favorites—enough at least for us to get some interesting data. So I reached out to a few younger friends to see if their own tastes matched any age-related trends. The results were not what I was expecting. I also reached out to an even younger cousin, closer in age to this mythical Era of Discovery.
If you’d like to contribute your own data to feed my ongoing curiosity, please feel free to fill out this survey; if I get enough responses, I’ll do a follow-up based on input from Solo readers.
Geoff and the Family Stone
I asked each participant to name their top five favorite albums: “These are specifically your personal favorite albums. It could be entire albums you always have on rotation, or a favorite artist’s album that has the highest number of your favorite songs.” I also made it clear that these didn’t have to be ranked—just the top five in any order.
To go further, I asked some related questions about where, and most importantly when, respondents first heard their selected albums. Tangentially related, I also asked how they listened to music now. Two-thirds said Spotify. The others said YouTube Music, with one of them also using Tidal.
I toyed with a few ideas about how to present this info, but I think a per-person analysis with some takeaways for each works best. We’ll go alphabetically.
Alexandro, 31 (Guadalajara, Mexico)
Alex’s sister is my housemate, and I’ve known them both for a long time. I wasn’t surprised to see David Bowie on his list, since Bowie is also one of his sister’s favorites—my guess is they both heard Ziggy Stardust around the same time. His other picks show why any assumptions about age-related tastes are difficult to substantiate. Sure, RAM would have come out in that “magic” window where tastes are supposed to solidify, but GNX and Un Canto por México are both from the last few years. There’s also a wide range of genres here, a common theme among responders to my mini-survey. Maybe that says more about my friend circle; not sure.
David Bowie: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972)
Kendrick Lamar: GNX (2024)
Three Days Grace: One-X (2006)
Daft Punk: Random Access Memories (2013)
Natalia Lafourcade: Un Canto por México, Vol. 1 (2020)
Alice, 34 (Ottawa, Canada)
Alice was the first to respond and immediately offered a great example of why it’s hard to make generalizations about eras and demographics. Three of her five choices came out before she was born. They were records her parents and friends’ parents played on repeat. Another is an album she listens to while working out, which of course is valid, but not quite what we’re looking for here.
However, her fifth pick definitely fits our vague hypothesis: Taylor Swift’s Fearless. She first heard it when she was 16 and still loves it. Is that the best of Swift’s albums? Depends who you ask, but similarly, the first Pink Floyd album I heard was Wish You Were Here, and I still like it better than all their others—so maybe there is something to this “age when you first heard it” theory. Furthering our theory, she first heard the three classic albums on the list when she was a kid.
The Highwaymen: Highwayman (1985)
Meat Loaf: Bat Out of Hell (1977)
Bruce Springsteen: Nebraska (1982)
Taylor Swift: Fearless (2008)
50 Cent: The Massacre (2005)
Amy, 28 (NYC, USA)
Amy’s picks are fascinating. Unlike most of the other respondents, her picks are almost entirely new-to-her, with Amy having started listening to them in the 2020s when she was in her 20s. Even something like The Waterfall, which would fit our theory about when tastes solidify based on its release date, she bonded with at a concert in 2021. And she first heard the older albums from Portugal. The Man at age 20. So more than any other participant, her picks entered her list most recently. Compare that with, say, Alice, who had several picks she first heard as a kid. No conclusions to be drawn here that I can think of, but it’s all just interesting.
The Mars Volta: De-Loused in the Comatorium (2003)
Magdalena Bay: Imaginal Disk (2024)
Portugal. The Man: American Ghetto (2010)
Portugal. The Man: The Satanic Satanist (2009)
My Morning Jacket: The Waterfall (2015)
Lena, 28 (Michigan, USA)
Lena’s choices match our hypothesis perhaps the best, in that she discovered four of her five choices during that magic era. Two of her album picks were even released in that same era, more than our other responders. Lena was also very detailed in her responses and able to pinpoint when and where she first heard each selection. I think, like with many of us, they were introduced to her at memorable times by people who were important to her, perhaps helping to elevate them to epic status. I can remember the occasions when I first heard some of the albums and songs that made my shortlist. For instance, I can tell you the exact time and place I first heard Clearest Blue by Chvrches, and anytime I hear it I’m still transported to that moment. Probably we all have songs like that.
The Lumineers: Cleopatra (2016)
Noah Kahan: Stick Season (Forever) (2022)
The Mamma Mia Cast: Mamma Mia! The Movie Soundtrack (2008)
Caamp: Lavender Days (2022)
Sza: Ctrl (2017)
Mary, 32 (Vienna, Austria)
Mary’s picks were an interesting mix of albums she’d recently discovered, either via friends or by seeing the artists in concert. There are others, like Diamond Life, that she remembers hearing as a kid. Of all our respondents, Mary seems to have the fewest picks she first heard in her teens. She’s probably the best example of this theory not being universal.
Frank Ocean: Channel Orange (2012)
Sade: Diamond Life (1984)
Night Tapes: portals//polarities (2025)
Big Thief: Double Infinity (2025)
Olivia Dean: Messy (2023)
Rupert, 35 (Swindon, UK)
Just when we thought we’d unearthed some consistent themes, Rupe drops in this mix of albums from the 1980s and ’90s—more than anyone on the list. However, these secretly match our theory. It’s not when the album came out that’s the hook, but when you heard it. Most of these he first experienced in his Era of Discovery.
A key component that we haven’t really pursued, but which is important to the broader discussion, is what kind of music the people in your life listen to. If you have older friends and family who are passionate about a band or genre, it’s natural for them to be your gateway into that world. So I guess I need to conduct another survey talking to everyone in the lives of the people who responded to this first one. Of course, then I’d need to know who influenced them, and then after a couple iterations I’d suddenly have 7 billion responses. I’m guessing that’s more than Google Forms allows.
Guns N’ Roses: Appetite for Destruction (1987)
AC/DC: Back in Black (1980)
Thunder: Backstreet Symphony (1990)
Pearl Jam: Backspacer (2009)
Dire Straits: Brothers in Arms (1985)
Coda
I didn’t set out to make the definitive study on how music tastes relate to age. But despite the arguably anecdotal results, I think there are some interesting takeaways here. For one, it’s too easy to assume that people’s tastes are based on their ages. Just look at the responses above. Not only is there no overlap in favorite albums, there isn’t even any duplication in artists. It’s common in marketing, which we talked about in that podcast, to figure out what demographic you want to target, and then choose music that came out 20 years after their birthdate. Maybe that works in a broad “this background music is fine” sense, but the specifics are far more interesting. Huh—it’s almost like humans aren’t a monolith. Wild if true.
What I did find, again from this small survey plus talking with other friends and family, is that what you were listening to in your teen years often (but not always) has an impact on your future tastes. Nearly everyone on this list, myself included, has at least one album from that era that’s still close to their heart. What they discovered on their own, or via the influential people in their lives (friends, family, etc.), in that magical Era of Discovery seems to have taken hold to some degree. Maybe this is all obvious to you, but I find it fascinating from an anthropological standpoint.
Taking a step back, I think for all of us it’s worth asking the question, “Is this thing good, or was I about 13 years old when I first heard it?” Because for a lot of popular culture, far too many people mistake something they like as definitively “good” and things they don’t like as “bad,” when the reality is that like/dislike and good/bad could have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
I also think, even with just this small sampling, it’s fair to say that good music transcends age groups. At least, that’s my takeaway. Another takeaway: be wary of the results of any self-reported study.
While the whole point of this column was to focus on a demographic that didn’t look like me, reading and listening to my friends’ lists got me thinking about my own. No one asked, but here it is:
Chvrches: Every Open Eye (2015)
Death Cab for Cutie: Plans (2005)
Bon Iver: For Emma, Forever Ago (2007)
Crash Test Dummies: God Shuffled His Feet (1993)
Pink Floyd: Wish You Were Here (1975)
To add a quick analysis like I did for the others, God Shuffled His Feet is definitely from that magic era, but so is Wish You Were Here—it was introduced to me by a cousin around that same time (along with another perennial favorite, Who’s Next). I like to think of myself as someone with a broad taste in music, but when the money’s on the table, clearly my tastes are narrower than I like to think. I could write about this for ages, because I find it fascinating. But I’ll end it here.
. . . Geoffrey Morrison
