Why do we stop exploring new music as we get older? | Hacker News Reader

Why do we stop exploring new music as we get older?

abc.net.au

27 pointselorant60 comments

Maybe because no matter what I do, I cannot get current streaming sites to recommend music as well as they did back in the Pandora and LastFM days.

And it's not just that I'm pickier and set in my ways, there are songs that I liked that were recommended to me then based on my other songs that I still have in the modern platforms now that haven't ever come up.

Meanwhile I'm skipping songs and thumbs-downing continuously and it won't learn. It just goes round and round the same few silos, none of which are quite right.

Is the ignoring of thumbs down and skips just lazily (not) dealing with the threat of people nuking content a la Reddit downvote brigades?

I don't know if that's an issue for music streamers or not (I guess if you allow one person's thumbs downs to affect others too much and there are millions of them... Maybe?)

But also seems like it would be a pretty trivial thing to filter out of the genuine signal for companies that literally exist by processing that data.

While many of the proposed explanations (anchoring, lack of discretionary time, etc) may be valid, I think the biggest factor is probably the social network: we are exposed to new music when we spend time with new people in a setting where they're selecting the music. And those kinds of social situations generally decline with age. You spend less time with new people, and less time in situations where there's a lot of music (clubs, house parties, riding around with friends in the car, etc).

While I do think I keep exploring new music today (37) I don't do it as much as I used to..

I think part of the reason is the novelty-factor falls the older you get, because you've.. simply experienced more stuff already.. Another part, I think, has to do with development, younger people are more impressionable, new experiences hit harder, they evoke stronger feeling.. For instance, the music I discovered when I was a kid, was mostly thrash metal from the 80s, so it was not new music, but it was new to me..

A third thing I think is relevant is, that everything that happened before our formative years, seem permanent, the old world, how things had (from our perspective) always been, but everything that happens during those formative years, are new and exciting and "right", not because of the things, but because of our own experiences.. Finally, things that happen later in our lives, are new and "not the right things" just simply because we already have had our time of formation, and those are the things we experienced in that very special light of our own formation.

As a GenXer I've been through many phases of looking for new music punctuated by times I was indifferent.

Lately I've discovered Claude Debussy, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Isao Tomita, Wendy Carlos, Goldfripp, Enigma, Information Society (I think the 2008 album Synthesizer is the best electronic music album ever) not to mention Chinese instrumental music. If something has a 5.1 mix I will listen to it and usually like it; in fact I can't stand listening to 2 channel music on my home theater.

I am indifferent though to "new" music that is being promoted now, and can't stand to listen to the radio. I like old-school rap as much as Techmoan (my age) does, but think rap went through an event horizon with T-Pain. When I hear obvious autotune I change the channel right away and have no patience for sound engineers who tell me I'm wrong.

I can say the same. I'm less interested in seeking out "new" music and more interested in music that seems to have stood the test of time.

The techniques of modern music production were developed for the movie industry and transfered to the music industry. Fantasia still has a pretty good soundtrack but music recordings before 1965 or (The Beatles) are unlistenable. The last year of music competes with 60 years of recorded music and that's a situation that just gets more extreme over time.

Obligatory mention of T-Pain's Tiny Desk Concert, in which he demonstrates, without autotune, that he's a talented musician and vocalist who's using it stylistically.

https://www.npr.org/2014/10/29/359661053/t-pain-tiny-desk-co...

I've got no problem w/ T-Pain himself, my problem is that every other rapper sounds like T-Pain today. The fact that he's had such an impact on the industry proves that he's a creative innovator. My problem is with everybody else.

Fair!

Retracted in light of BoorishBear's comment, which is definitely true. I'm not a big hip hop guy, but I think that the "everyone sounds like T-Pain" comment is something like 10-15 years out of date.

I have to say that I'm really not a fan of what seems to be "topping the charts" in hip-hop today, but even so, there's undeniably people doing new and interesting things in the genre.

A few releases since the heyday of T-Pain that I did enjoy:

* To Pimp a Butterfly

* DAMN

* Coloring Book

* Kids See Ghosts

* We Got It From Here ... Thank You For Your Service

I've also really enjoyed some of the hip-hop adjacent stuff that Thundercat has put out, especially Drunk. (Thundercat is amazingly talented, and was a big part of the production on TPAB).

A bit like how Blade Runner's rain-soaked neon cybernoir now feels derivative!

That and the mumblerap popularized by Drake means a lot of hip hop sounds the same.

> my problem is that every other rapper sounds like T-Pain today

They really don't, but you've made up your mind so you'll only ever really hear it when it sounds like T-Pain, then go "you see! all sounds like T-pain!"

Since the T-Pain era (known as the ringtone rap era) we've had everything from To Pimp a Butterfly to Flower Boy to Kids See Ghosts to LP!

It's been a decade+ of innovation on a level that makes the old days look mundane.

I'm in my late 40s and try to do a lot of music exploration and discovery, and I've found a lot that I like, but I can't find anything new-ish that "sticks". Despite all the exploring and all the many one-off tracks I've found that I really, really like, it's painful to sort through all the chaff that Streaming sends you. When I go out to work in the garage or chill out for the day, I don't want to have my "discovery" filter on. I fall back to my comfort zone and put on a full album of something like Yes, King Crimson, ELP, Rush, Floyd, Zeppelin, maybe something more out there like Mike Oldfield, or even Tangerine Dream, Jarre, Vangelis, Klaus Schulze, and so on. The default is easy and I don't have to sit there listening closely and thinking "do I like this one enough to bookmark it?" I've never found streaming to deliver more more than 20% hit, 80% miss. And the hits don't hit hard enough to get into my default "safe" rotation.

"Why does X Y when Z?"

Speak for yourself, hivemind Australian mainstream media, I listen to even more types of music now. I'm continually running out of space to put vinyl. I understand how some people resort to building built-in vinyl shelve rooms and lease warehouse space for it. There are dozens to hundreds of people with more than 500k records. I call it "organized hoarding." ;)

I'm 48, and tbh, I listen to some newer music and do spend some time seeking it out. A lot of commercial music is really contrived, formulaic, derivative and not much fun.

The loss of a lot of new music avenues really hurts things as well, the suggestion systems in many of today's streaming options don't match how Pandora was earlier on, and absolutely fails to bring in much new.

Curated content is all but dead as well... Many local stations are now automated bots and MTV became something else long, long ago now. I'm unlikely to go clubbing at this point in life either.

I think it's a general miss from industry trends and kind of wish that we could get more curated streams and content in place, in addition to introducing variability to feeds from the streaming sites/apps.

I don't know about past generations, but in the case of my generation, it's because new music has been horrible since about the late 90's.

If you're purely talking about the quality of the music at the top of the charts then this is debatable, but there is always plenty of great new music coming out all the time... more than we can possibly process nowadays, in my opinion.

And I say this as someone whose favorite time in popular music IS the mid-90's. Many of my favorite albums are from that time.

The greatest guitar player in the world is probably some YouTuber with 15 followers that I'll never hear of.

This gives me confidence that some day someone will find me.....

Check out Tim Henson from Polyphia.

It all depends on the genre, although by listening and digging around using the right tools one could discover some gems that elsewhere would be buried by the mainstream top chart rubbish.

As an example, I'm deeply into progressive rock. One could think that after the 70s the genre would be completely dead, which is not true. Of course listening to TV or FM radio could only reinforce that idea, but thanks to Napster back in the day, and a simple search years ago that brought a couple really nice online radios (0,1), I discovered a number of great modern artists and bands. I passed my mid 50s and I wish I could know 1/10 of the artists I discover each year today when I was in my 20s or 30s.

(0) http://www.themusicalbox.com.ar/tmbradio.htm (Argentina)

URL: https://tmbradio.radioca.st/stream

(1) https://www.progulus.com/rprweb/#page-playing (USA)

URL: http://149.56.234.136:9992/stream

I'm pretty sure every generation has thought that for basically all of recorded history.

It's different now. When I was growing up in the 80s, music prior to the late Sixties was classified as "oldies" and only older people listened to it. Now, you hear people of all ages listening to music from the 1970s-1980s era -- stuff that's pushing fifty years old! -- and no one bats an eye.

I submit that this is happening because the newest popular music simply isn't as good as it used to be. It should be as weird to hear a teenager listening to Zeppelin and the Stones today as it would have been for my high-school friends in the mid-1980s to listen to Glenn Miller and Cab Calloway. But it's not.

I would say that every generation before you has said the same thing. I'm sure there are reviews from the generation before you lamenting how terrible your favorite artists are and how the younger generation doesn't know good music.

I am definitely younger than you but am reaching the age where it seems like people give up on new music and decided a few years back I never wanted to say anything like your comment in my life. There's so much new music out there that at worst it will become a discovery problem in old age.

My strategies so far are first to always have an open mind to any popular artists I am hearing for the first time and to not completely write them off if they remain popular. Adele isn't for me but there's no way to say she's objectively bad. On the other hand constant recommendations for Black pink opened me up to KPop.

I also have become ok with not being among the first fans of someone and also being ok with people having different taste. Seems like there are a lot of people who make music their personality, look down on people who like new or different styles that they have decided are inferior, and then when their preferred genre or style stops being popular they just give up. If someone is really passionate about something different it's usually worth giving it an objective shot. I take all recommendations from friends and especially younger people seriously.

I also am lucky that a lot of the music I like works really well in DJ sets. I grew up listening to rap, which always allowed me to hear various artists. I'm glad I grew up in the mid Atlantic and never had the false pressure to say one region made better rap, and was able to appreciate songs with intricate wordplay as well as songs that are just meant to be bangers where the words are just there to help the song flow.

In college it was an easy transition to genres like Baltimore club and its variants. At the time I thought they would replace rap instead of rap evolving and Jersey club being incorporated into the larger EDM scene. That transition opened me up to the massive number of DJs making some kind of electronic music of all kinds of various types.

No clue where my journey will take me, but I know there's no feeling like hearing new music that you just really like. Just today, got to experience that feeling watching an ISOxo set.

I plan to be on that journey for the rest of my life.

I enjoy new stuff, even cheesy Autotuned pop, but I'm less likely to actively hunt for new things. Maybe priorities change. I do hunt around other genres a bit more, such as classical and eastern.

As an aside, I'm interested in the impact music platforms on exploration and collection.

Once Upon a Time I loved having curated CD and record collections. Even more so when MP3s came out. With the transition to streaming music, I have basically given up on the idea of a curated collection. This is reduced my interest in Exploration and music in general. I mostly listen to what I'm fed and find it marginally satisfying.

For those of you that continue to explore and collect music in the streaming world, how do you do it? Any tips or tools?

I just continued collecting. I especially like old albums that are not available on streaming services.

The lazy answer is I go to the Bandcamp homepage and look at the daily articles, the new and notable songs, and if nothing catches my eye I watch the stream of what people are buying for a bit and click on things that look interesting. The last part is hard to replicate but enough people buy enough music that it updates too fast almost.

I also stream from the 2 week show archives of KEXP. Recently I've been enjoying https://www.kexp.org/shows/overnight-afrobeats/

I also stream from the 2 week show archives of KEXP. Recently I've been enjoying https://www.kexp.org/shows/overnight-afrobeats/

Do they still blast a vuvuzela every 30 seconds on that show? That's when I tuned out.

Make a Bandcamp account and follow users that buy music similar to your tastes. Then, semi-frequently, browse through the feed of everything your followed users have bought recently and sample it until you find something you like. Prune and add followed users as necessary to make it more likely to find something you like.

These days I mostly just transcode to mp3 from youtube. Nothing about it is ideal.

I used to use what.cd to both collect high quality mp3s and to explore new music (their similar music engine was phenomenal). Unfortunately what was shut down a few years ago.

My theory is that it isn't just music - what people often prefer in most categories is the "familiar". When you're young, it's all new so we explore, but after a while we gravitate towards things that are like things we already know.

Having said that, what saved me from being stuck in the 80's was almost single-handedly Scrubs, the sitcom. Joshua Radin, Jon Mclaughlin, Colin Hay (re-introduction), Matt Nathanson. Wish I could find another source as good as that again.

A sitcom helped your music taste?

All I can say, is give it a watch. Funny and heartfelt writing, regularly featuring a song from a contemporary folk artist. I think Zach Braff got much of the credit, and took some of that sensibility to the big screen with Garden State.

I've seen it, I enjoyed it too. I was just surprised that it impacted your music taste but I think I understand now, that makes sense!

Why not? Familiarity and association with positive emotions surely has a strong effect on our music tastes. It's why people often gravitate to the music of those around them they identify with.

The movie Titanic single-handedly turned me into a classical music aficionado.

I've sought out the songs from a lot of shows and movies over the years, so can only imagine others would do the same. Of course, a lot of the time, it's a single song by a given artist that I like, where most of the rest I could care less for.

This is pretty well documented so to speak, as the reason 18 to 34 is such a key demo. Many older folks already have brand preference and are less likely or willing to explore. I can honestly say that's mostly true of myself as I've gotten older...

If I had to guess, the unwillingness to find new music is probably strongly correlated with increased isolation as one ages (from meeting tons of new people as a kid because you didn't know better, to entrenching deeper into your cliques throughout middle and high school, to meeting tons of new people again in college, to re-entrenching into your clique as a working adult with no time to make friends, to re-entrenching into your family as kids and the commute from your suburban, car-centric neighborhood to your urban, car-centric business district and back consume your entire life).

There's probably a factor of listening to music from the "good times" as an escape from the monotony and dregs of daily life consume most of people's days too. I remember TV, music and events from the 90s and 00s, but nostalgia does nothing for me.

As for me, the "good times" of high school were terrible for me, I lived in NYC basically on my own during college, and I'm 35 with no kids, so I haven't stopped discovering new music (or myself)!

In fact, between Last.fm (still up and running!), Bandcamp, Apple Music, Spotfy, and automatically-generated New Music Mixes, the amount of new music that's out there is almost overwhelming!

And you never needed new music ... you just need enough music.

You fill that gap with new music in your youth because of peer pressure and convenience.

Then, once you have enough for a lifetime's repeat listening, barring something really catching your attention, you're done.

Limited bandwidth in my case. I simply don't have enough time to track the several hundred bands/artists I've liked over the years, with a job and family too. New is even harder.

Combined with the impact of the accountant-driven music business and internet pulling the rug out from the industry, overall quality has actually declined. Not only in the "kids these days" sense.

(There was an interesting article recently on here about music discovery being very difficult today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33179147 "Too Many Songs, Not Enough Hits: Pop Music Is Struggling to Create New Stars - billboard.com")

I was focusing on live music up until very recently. Unfortunately the ticketmaster surveillance/auction dystopia has turned me off of a substantial portion of that as well.

I think people get busy as they get older. Learning gets harder too, so hearing a new song either involves learning a new structure (more difficult) or is using the same constructs as they already know (boring).

Also, most people are nostalgic for old music that was popular (to them) in their late teens and early 20s. For most people, this is when they had the most new experiences: learned to drive, had more freedoms, first kiss, first girlfriend, marriage, traveling, new foods, first job, moved out of home, got a house etc.

And with all of this was music as the soundtrack. So the most exciting time of life is that period of life because literally everything is new, and therefore exciting. New experiences are good!

Then as we get older we don't have many new experiences as we settle into living a life of conformity. It takes real effort to find new things, and most people are just too busy trying to survive or raise children to actually go and find something new.

So that's my opinion on why people regress to listening to music they are familiar with - songs that don't involve forming new brain pathways or having to listen critically, and instead just listen to things they know which reminds them of more exciting (and perhaps happier) times when life was full of promise and new.

Of course, there is also just a finite number of song combinations and most popular music uses the same scales (major, minor, mixolydian modes with infrequent straying into anything else), the same rhythms (no polyrhythms), and the same song structures (intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus x 2), so new stuff is both unfamiliar, and yet boring.

If you attempt to introduce new music to people, most don't know what instruments are involved and instead listen to the melody or lyrics not textures or mix so can't extract anything good from a new song because they don't know how to pick out at least something from the song. I find some RnB horrible but at least the mix is interesting (other than deafening bass drums).

HN skews early 30's so it's no surprise half the comments ITT confirm the assumption that people stop listening to new age music. I'm here to inform you that music is as good as ever, you're probably just crystallizing in your tastes, and at least the "kids these days" have more fun https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oD9pUHHGZo

Also relevant, the Nick Swardson bit on old people music: https://youtu.be/Z7IlUIi-idA?t=12

Na, music industry is doing really badly. Record label are dying, concerts are suffering seriously. Social media and video games ate 99% of the attention music had in the past. This has very serious consequences on the art.

tbf Travis Scott made an absolutely insane amount of money from his concert in Minecraft last year. The music industry is fine. It's just different.

Minecraft is also better in terms of crowd safety.

I'm sure Scott can find a way to test that

That's not even music.

If we start reasoning from the secretary problem [0] then a possible theory is that when people are young, the first music they hear is the best song they've ever heard in their life. As time passes, it is more and more likely that they find their peak listening experience.

This basic effect seems like a plausible explanation for many things. It happens simultaneously across all fields of experience too, so the compound effect is pretty serious.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

Maybe one thing worth adding here is the nostalgia factor. I'm not yet 30, but I often gravitate towards the music I relate with easier, carefree times. I find it true especially with OSTs of older games I played. The nostalgic value is giving the music another dimension, which is impossible to replicate when listening to new music, even if it's great. That being said I'm happy that I got into EDM genre as it's pretty easy to follow a few selected artists throughout the years, which naturally exposes me to new material.

"One explanation for the age-based reduction in music consumption simply posits that responsibility-laden adults may have less discretionary time to explore their musical interests than younger people."

This seems most likely? I'm so busy with life and work that I don't have time to explore new music as I used to.

That said, today's pop music sounds really bad to me, so my musical tastes may have solidified and I'm not as open to new music.

I am in my 34th year and I listen to more new music now than I ever have. Most live music shows I go to now are for newer bands that I’ve only just started listening to. YouTube and DeeZer give me excellent suggestions for music.

Maybe after time we find enough favorites that we can live with the existing pool rather than hunt for yet more. After you collect say 20k favorites, you won't hear any one of them often enough to become stale.

I'm coming up on 30, and I enjoy checking out the charts on rateyourmusic. I'm always looking for something new to listen to while I'm working.

Since about 2005 only listen to mix shows because to me that became the best way to find new music in a curated way. Radio 1's Essential Mix just perfect in every single way for example

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd7Z90NLZ80 There's also this.

I'm not sure what I don't explore as much new music as I used to many years ago.

I think the last new to me band I started regularly listening to is Sloppy Seconds, and that came about in a very roundabout way. I overheard someone at work say they needed a new ethernet card, someone nearby said they had a spare and tried to hand it to the first guy, and the first guy said "I don't want your sloppy seconds!". Then they realized what "sloppy seconds" mean, and said "Uh oh...am I allowed to say that at work?".

I told them not to worry. If someone complains just tell HR you were talking about the band. For every vulgar or shocking word or phrase there is a band somewhere with that as their name. If HR wants details just tell them you heard them at a small club when you were in college.

I then Googled "sloppy seconds band" and indeed there was one. The description said:

> Sloppy Seconds is an American, Ramones-influenced punk band sometimes referred to as a junk rock band from Indianapolis, Indiana, United States, that started in 1984. They gained notoriety in the underground punk scene with gritty and controversial songs like "Come Back, Traci," "I Don't Want to be a Homosexual", "Jani is a Nazi", "I Want 'em Dead" and "So Fucked Up."

> The band's unusual and controversial lyrics encompass pornography, classic horror movies, classic television shows, comic books, alcohol, being fat, and getting drunk.

I like the Ramones, classic TV shows, comic books, and am fat so checked if they were on Spotify. They were. I listed to some tracks and there was some good stuff.

I've occasionally listened to the Billboard Hot 100 playlist on Spotify to see what is currently popular, but haven't really come across anything there made me want to hear more from the same artist.

I recently was in the mood for tragic songs. I was thinking of things along the lines of "Tell Laura I Love Her" or "Dead Man's Curve", and tried to do a search for likely playlists of such songs. One of the results was "Tragic Ballads for Crying" which was around 4 hours of music.

That was pretty good, although it was mostly older folk songs so didn't actually fit what I had been trying to find. By far the most seemed to be old Irish and Scottish songs, with songs about families with members fighting on both sides of the American Civil War being the third most common.

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