People Stop Listening To New Music After Age 33 -- Latest Study

A new study published in the blog Skynet & Ebert has found that people stop listening to new music by the age of 33. The blog is run by a former management consultant, Ajay Kalia, who currently works at Spotify and The Echo Nest. Kalia is a product owner for taste profiles at Spotify and he conducted the study by analysing individual listening data from U.S. Spotify users.

Kalia said that he combined the data from Spotify with data from Echo Nest that revealed an artist’s popularity. This was then used to identify how popular the artist was on an average. He stated that he “Generated a metric for the average popularity of the artists a listener streamed in 2014. With that score per user, we could compute a median across all users of a specific age and demographic profile.”

To measure this, he used the data from Spotify’s taste profiles and clubbed them with the popularity ranking API of the Echo Nest. Through observing individual preferences, he found that teenagers stick to the top 40 songs played in the radio, keeping themselves up to date with the current music trend and culture. But as they reach their late 20’s and early 30’s, people tend to stick on to the songs they listened to in their teenage years. By the age of 33, the study pointed that one’s interest in new music deteriorates with the coming of the idea that he or she is an adult and is no more a “kid.”

The trend also varies between the genders; women mostly were found to cling on to the most popular songs playing on the radio. Both men and women begin exploring various genres of music before they reach their 30’s. In their 30’s, they find the music they are most comfortable with and settle down with it, thus killing the urge to explore new music.

"Becoming a parent has an equivalent impact on your 'music relevancy' as ageing about four years,” Kalia said. With parents, he stated that the process speeds up and parents tend to listen to lesser popular music than the average listener of the same age. He explained that having a child is a ‘binary’ event. “Once it happens, a lot of other things go out the window.”

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