Stuck listening to songs from your teen years? Blame the musical rut

I wasn’t the only one experiencing this. Musicians, lifelong fans, and even people raised on their parents’ vinyl collection admitted that they just didn’t listen to music as much anymore. So, I dug deeper, with 13 tabs open, to find out that we weren’t just listening less, we were discovering less as well. And that has led us into a musical rut, the kind you would find yourself in while driving to work one fine day.

But what’s behind this disenchantment? As much as we’d like to believe people just get grumpier with age, it is not that. According to a 2018 survey by European streaming service Deezer, our music discovery peaks by the ripe age of 24 and ultimately stagnates and declines by the age of 31, leaving us in a “musical paralysis”, listening to the same songs over and over again. In fact, our music tastes are pretty much cultivated in our adolescent years. At an age when we are unable to drive, drink, or make most decisions, we lock down our soundtrack for life.

The fact that music paralysis occurs across generations eliminates the chance that it’s a cause and effect of new technology, or “TikTok ruining music”, or it being an exclusively Gen Z phenomenon. It most likely stems from developmental factors as we age — we have lesser idle time, our priorities shift, etc. In fact, a study shows that new parents show less inclination to listen to music. One reason that stood out to me the most, which felt like the underlying disease of everything we have discussed so far, was that with time, we stop experiencing new things, largely limiting ourselves to the motions of the life we have already created.

And music doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Take, for instance, the nostalgia for the ‘Summer Of 2016’. There is a large Internet sentiment that claims that songs in that period were just made ‘different’. 25-year-olds today, including me, still talk about the FIFA soundtfracks like they were revolutionary. Justin Bieber may be releasing albums even today, but the hits back then felt different. The music wasn’t objectively better, but for kids born between 1997 and 2002, this was the time they were going through some major life events — falling in love for the first time, graduating school, charting out careers — and life just seemed hopeful. If a song resonated back then, it was more likely to stay with us for years to come. At the end of the day, as neuroscientist Daniel Levitin writes in This Is Your Brain on Music, our taste ultimately boils down to familiarity, and nothing is more familiar than the soundtrack to our own coming of age.

It also doesn’t help that most of the mainstream music nowadays is manufactured, marketed, and engineered for the sake of virality and a 30-second reel hook. It’s enough if a song makes it to a bunch of mainstream influencers’ dance videos. Even the algorithm, although not the sole cause, is a sizeable one that hinders us from discovering music from genres or artists that may not be as viral, and feeds us more of what we already like.

So, is this it? Am I on my way to being scoffed at by a teenager as I play my favourite album by the Strokes for the umpteenth time? Not necessarily. Research has also shown that musical tastes need not calcify, and can continue to develop through our lives. A cultural phenomenon is just that — an observation, and not the gospel truth. Keeping the warm embrace of nostalgia aside, we can once again experience the thrill of music discovery, irrespective of our age. All we have to do is keep an open ear.