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Comment by photojosh | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

Exactly how I feel at 37.

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.

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