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Comment by McLaren_Ferrari | Hacker News Reader

The population is getting older too.

Music is the most age dependant business. It's literally impossible to discover your favorite song at age 35+ and it's most likely already buried in your brain forever between 14 and 20.

Same things for movies, franchises sell because there is a familiarity to it. Stuff that isn't franchise just doesn't sell. A possible exception would be biopics.

I predict a huuuge amount of high budget biopic to integrate revenues from franchises.

JFK, MLK, Reagan, Hendrix, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, The Eagles, Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan...they will all get a biopic with a budget of no less than 175M a pop.

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> It's literally impossible to discover your favorite song at age 35+ and it's most likely already buried in your brain forever between 14 and 20.

With all due respect, this sounds like a comment from someone who's not really into music.

I did a quick check with a musical friend to see if he shared my initial reaction... "what's your favourite song?" resulted in "I have no idea how to answer that question. Maybe ask me my top 100 favourites?"

I'm well over that age now, and I have a new "favourite song" every week or two. Easing into more free time as the kids get older and am using some of that to go see more live music from local bands.

Exactly how I feel at 37.

It's a very "consumes music as a mass market product" vibe. My preferred genres have changed over and over, and since I've had a Spotify account since they came to the US, I can easily scroll back over playlists and see that. Hell, I started practicing making music as a hobby at the age of 29.

In the last decade alone (I'm 30), I went from primarily classic rock and folk music mixed with some movie soundtracks to metal to Eurobeat to J-Pop. My favorite song when I was 14 was probably something by Feist or the Beatles, maybe something by Queen. Now it's definitely something from a J-Pop or Vocaloid artist. Somewhere between that I'd have said something by Franz Ferdinand or White Stripes (and to be fair, I do listen to them quite a bit).

Approaching age 40. Most of my favorite songs are probably from the 60s and 70s (5-20 years before I was born), but I only heard most of them (the ones that are my favorites) after age 35. I like plenty of newer music, too. I discover great new-to-me stuff from many decades, including the current one, all the time. This seems pretty normal in my social circle, though few of us are super into music.

There aren't a ton of albums that I liked between the ages of 14 and 20 that I'd still defend as "good", though a handful are still nostalgia-listens for me. I had pretty shit taste in music then, really.

I hope when I’m in my 30s and 40s and decades after I’m still finding and enjoying new music from times before I was born to times after my youth.

Ha! Some of my current favourite artists are barely older than my kids!

What's amazing is that you can hear their influences as being the music I was listening to when I was a teen through to my early 20s.

Example: Nothing but Thieves are my #1 favourite in terms of recent rockers; you can hear the Queen, Jeff Buckley, Muse, Pink Floyd influences in there. I might be hallucinating some of it, but I swear half my teen favourites are in there somewhere.

Another point; some of my favourite bands that were making great music many years ago are still putting out new albums, but they're just missing the edge now, sounding a bit formulaic.

There is something I saw on YT a year or so ago from a guitar teacher who said that his students have changed over the past 15 years: they used to come in and say "I want to learn this song from my favorite band" - and now, overwhelmingly, when asked what they want to learn, they shrug and start scrolling through their phone to try to find an answer. They want to learn, but not anything specifically. And often when they have something, it could be the most random old thing, from any era.

That is, the song catalogue has stopped being something that has turnover, it just keeps accumulating into a library of dusty shelves, and that makes it hard for young people to assert norms as in days past and tell everyone "this band that was marketed to my demographic is totally the best and nothing will ever beat them" - which is where a concept of "best song" is going to come from, because hardly anyone is trying to assign letter grades to their listening.

Instead you'll see a more apocalyptic Fall-of-Rome tone in the comments of old hits: "I'm only 13 but I wish I were in the 80's, best decade for music nothing like today's crap". It's so common a sentiment as to be memetic and widely riffed upon.

Something has definitely changed in the music business.

There are elements where sound has deteriorated, functionally, from what used to be common practice. (this is of interest to me as it's 9/10ths of my day job)

Handled properly, modern digital audio is easily capable of containing the magic sounds of particular classic time periods: not just the 80s, if you really work at it you can get late 70s represented properly, even without using period recording equipment. But you cannot mess around, you have to do it a particular way.

People aren't significantly different from the 70s or the 60s or the 80s, as far as music creation goes. But the common practices are wildly different, and technology had a forcing effect causing the sounds of a decade (or time period) to take on a consistent quality based on the available tools and distribution media. That's all. You know it's not just 70s and 80s: there's electronic genres where the 90s fill a similar nostalgia role, and coincidentally have an obvious, distinct sound that is not heard today, and can to large effect be recalled through determinedly sticking to the period tools…

>It's literally impossible to discover your favorite song at age 35+ and it's most likely already buried in your brain forever between 14 and 20.

I don't have a single favorite song, but the band Ghost is high in my personal rotation -and they didn't even make a record until I was 44.

And I didn't discover most of my favorite bands until I was in my 20's.

I'm an avid music listener (in my 30s), and it'd be hard for me to name just 1 (or 10 or even 30) of my favorite songs. A couple of albums I keep in high regard came out in the last several years. Also, I seem to wear out music over time: you can only listen to Loveless or SAW 89-92 or Astral Weeks or Velvet Underground and Nico so many times. I know, yes, those albums are some of the best music made, but I don't find pleasure in re-listening them for the 100th time - I'd rather listen to something new.

I probably took after my dad when it comes to music listening. He's in his 60s and still actively searching for and finding new favorites.

Sounds very much like me. I like to keep listening too new music.

No it’s not literally impossible to discover your favorite song when you are 35 or older. You just have to continue to seek out new music.

Right, my favourite song definitely changes over time. I don't get people whose musical preferences freeze in place in their twenties. I mean, I also don't get my friends who like Folk but there's no accounting for taste, freezing at that specific age just seems even weirder.

The article seems unhappy about sampling, but basically sampling has been important more or less since it became practical. There was a rash of songs a while back that I thought were all sampling an old favourite I bought as a CD single last century. But they aren't! They're just using the same sample it does which is from a 1932 trumpet line.

And sampling empowers the outsiders they're enthusiastic about. Lil Nas X wouldn't be anywhere without (almost certainly illegally until he was signed and somebody papered over the cracks with $$$ and co-writing credits) sampling Nine Inch Nails "34 Ghosts IV". Yes that's a great old timey banjo sound, but it ain't sampled from some obscure old banjo tune, Trent and Atticus put a bunch of work into making it sound that way.

I'm in my early 40s, I've just discovered Kino [1], I think they're really damn great. I "discovered" Ornella Vanoni and Mina when I was in my mid 30s, me and my SO have formed a habit of listening to this Mina song [2] each New Year's Eve, at exactly midnight (it also helps our dog and cat focus on us and on the music inside the house, and not on the fireworks outside).

Between 14 and 20 years of age I was listening to some cool music, too (it was that interesting period just after grunge and as brit-pop was taking off), but, to be honest, the lyrics from those songs and even the music itself don't speak to me that much anymore.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kino_(band)

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGcX5wopq3M

> Music is the most age dependant business. It's literally impossible to discover your favorite song at age 35+ and it's most likely already buried in your brain forever between 14 and 20.

Nah. When I was a teenager, I was listening to classic rock and folk music. When I was in my mid 20s, I got into metal. Now I'm 30 and would absolutely give you a list of J-Pop songs competing for the title of "favorite song."

What nonsense. I'm 37 and my favourite song changes all the time.

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