As We Grow Older, Our Music Taste Appears To Narrow To Fewer Songs

What’s your favorite song? Maybe it’s a classic, maybe it’s a forgotten B-side, a love song, a musical number, or something else. It is often said that it’s something we listened to as teenagers that we link to the strong emotions of those years. There might be truth to that, or at least we become less adventurous when we grow older.

The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

Researchers from several universities worked together to understand the relationship we have with music and how that changes with age. They looked at 40,000 users from music service Last.fm over the course of 15 years. The dataset contained over 1 million different songs, which have been played over 542 million times.

“In the study, we can follow how music listening changes over a longer period of time. When companies like Spotify try to develop music recommendations for their customers, they don’t necessarily look at listening habits throughout users’ lives,” study's co-author Alan Said, associate professor of computer science at the University of Gothenburg, said in a statement.

The data shows that teenagers listen to a wide variety of popular music, and that listening habits expand to consider more genres and artists in the transition from adolescence to adulthood. But as we grow older, that spectrum shrinks, creating a peculiar duality. The older user listens to new music in their favorite genres, but nostalgia becomes a crucial driving force.   

“When you're young, you want to experience everything. You don't go to a music festival just to listen to one particular band, but when you become an adult, you've usually found a style of music that you identify with. The charts become less important,” explained Said. “Most 65-year-olds don't embark on a musical exploration journey.”

A fascinating aspect of this research was the fact that older people's listening habits were quite unique compared to those of teenagers. A younger person's playlist will have many songs that are shared among their peer group. For the over-65s, the field is narrower but more unique.

Music has been linked to morality, too, but this work raises some interesting questions about recommendation services and how they can or might affect your listening habits. Are they allowing you to listen beyond your usual, or are they serving you more of what you are used to?

“A service that recommends the same type of music in the same way to everyone risks missing what different groups actually want. Younger listeners may benefit from recommendations that mix the latest hits with suggestions for older music they have not yet discovered. Middle-aged listeners appreciate a balance between new and familiar, while older listeners want more tailored recommendations that reflect their personal tastes and nostalgic reminiscences,” explained Said.

The research was presented at the 2025 User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization conference.