Freeze Factor

I've known people my age who decided in the early 1970s that they've heard all of the music they needed to hear in this life, and as long as they still had access to The Beatles and The Stones, they didn't need to listen to anything new.  I've known others who made it as far as the B-52s and the Talking Heads before calling it quits, and still others who made it all the way to grunge and the alternative rock of the 90s before giving up.  I'm one of the few people I know who still keeps asking, "and then what?"  

According to a recent study, on average, we stop listening to new music at age 33.  That's most assuredly not the case here, but I also think the researchers let their own preconceived notions and biases affect their interpretation of the data.

For the study, the researchers obtained Spotify user data and compared listener age to a popularity ranking of the artists to whom they were listening.  As shown in the spiral chart above, young teens listen almost exclusively to only very popular, top-selling music, and that's about it.  But as those teens age into their twenties, they begin exploring their options and start listening to music with lower popularity ranks, i.e., not just the Top 40, and their taste moves away from the popular center of the graph.  This process continues, albeit as a slower rate, between the ages of 25 and 33, after which the listener maintains the same "popularity" index in their listening for the rest of their lives (or at least until age 48).  

I don't think it's going to come as a great revelation to many that the majority of people stop listening to new music at some point or another in their adult life,  That "age freeze factor" may be a real thing, but I don't think that's what this chart is saying.  What the study doesn't seem to take into account is that there are relatively few artists at the center of the popularity bubble (e.g., Taylor Swift and Katy Perry), but there's a whole lot of bands and musicians out there with lower popularity rankings.  The study seems to assume that if the average popularity rank of your listening doesn't change, you're listening to the same thing, but doesn't seem to consider that there are only a handful of acts in the Top 40, but thousands of bands with lower popularity ranks. Another way of interpreting the data is that young people, age 16 and lower, listen to a very small number of artists, but as they mature and start branching out, the number of artists they listen to increases exponentially.  

For example, if I were to first discover jazz at age 33, I could start listening to a new (at least to me) musician every month, but since 100 or so jazz musicians all have the same, relatively low popularity rank,  the graph wouldn't budge off of the trend shown above (as long as I don't go completely off the rails and into the avant garde).  According to the logic of the study, I'd be done listening to new music, but in reality 'd be at vintage record stores and the fringes of the internet devouring new music as  fast as I could.  Even if a few years after that, I branched out from jazz  and started listening to music as diverse as post-punk, indie singer-songwriters, and ambient, as long as the particular artists weren't, on average, significantly more or less popular than the jazz musicians before, the trend would still hold.

So I would interpret the data another way - initially, people follow the herd and listen to music by only a handful of very popular artists, but as they grow into their 20s and 30s, they start to explore music by artists more to their particular liking.  As there are exponentially more performers outside the Top 40 bubble than in it, the adult listener has a much larger universe to explore, and can choose to keep on discovering new music or choose not to, and that's been my observation of those around me in my life.