The Data Is In: You Like The Music You Heard When You Were 14

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by Shaddam IV, Feb 12, 2018.

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  1. Terrapin Station

    Terrapin Station Master Guns

    Location:
    NYC Man/Joy-Z City
    Yeah, same here. The way my tastes have changed over the years is that they've broadened. A lot of stuff I used to dismiss or dislike I like now.

    But everything I liked when I was a kid I like just as much if not more now. I simply like a much wider variety of stuff.
     
  2. Terrapin Station

    Terrapin Station Master Guns

    Location:
    NYC Man/Joy-Z City
    I didn't start listening to Insane Clown Posse until I was 33. :p
     
  3. Jose Jones

    Jose Jones Outstanding Forum Member

    Location:
    Detroit, Michigan
    The hangover of the "Me Generation" has lasted for decades.
     
  4. Terrapin Station

    Terrapin Station Master Guns

    Location:
    NYC Man/Joy-Z City
    If it doesn't fit enough people, does it really fit the average male?

    Anyway, of course people are going to talk about their own experience in light of something like this. What do you expect people to do on message boards?
     
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  5. Dillydipper

    Dillydipper Space-Age luddite

    Location:
    Central PA
    These are things we could all do. Also, these are things, we saw all our friends could do. 14 however, is a major step in the permissions you take for yourself...like not asking Mommy if you can cross town on your bike, through downdown, over 3 sets of railroad, and essentially wonder if you'll get home in time...as opposed to worrying if you Mom would say that's okay. Choosing your own friends was always your call, but at 5 your parents know for the most part, all those friends. By 8th grade, you choose from a much wider pool of people your parents never heard of. You had your own radio at 5 perhaps, but most people "chose to choose" their actual music and pursue it only after your hormones started firing, and found an identity beyond what all your family and friends liked. This is a major change.

    Sure, you can go on all night about how your particular parents let you drive at seven, and let you choose your own designer drugs at 3...but don't think that isn't always an exception that proves the rule. And still, I remind you, the music you learned at 14 is still different than before, because you were different from before. A teenagers' chemical balance does have an effect on the world they suddenly are thrust into by what is now coursing through your bloodstream, the different height you may have just sprouted to, the different "other thing" you may have just "sprouted" ;) and all those other things that make this study credible.

    Don't you see this every day, in every chat site you visit? Somebody passes along information about things that happen to "all of us" when we reach this age, or that age, and sure enough, Poindexter The Party-Pooper will chime in, "oh, naww, I was changing my own diapers at 16 months"; "actually I finished The Lord Of The Rings before Kennedy was shot"; "I built my own car in high school Shop class"; "I'm from Ohio, and I was listening to The Beatles before George joined up"...etc. If there are all these whiz-kids all around us, disqualifying shared information by submitting undocumented testament to show how much more advanced a species we are than "that study" suggests...then why aren't we living in a better world?

    Moral Of The Rant: does no use to challenge a fact just to invalidate the further facts the first fact is trying to support. It just makes the bulls charge faster. Ole!
     
  6. Jackson

    Jackson Senior Member

    Location:
    MA, USA
    Sure i like some music i heard at fourteen, i also like music i heard for the first time yesterday that sounds nothing like what i heard at fourteen.
     
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  7. floweringtoilet

    floweringtoilet Forum Resident

    Location:
    Warren, RI, USA
    I know people tend to have pretty strong objections to this hypothesis, but it rings true to me. It's not an absolute, but I've found, especially as I've gotten older that I find a certain [I don't know the right word...comfort?] in revisiting the music I discovered when I was around 14: David Bowie, The Clash, Talking Heads, The Feelies, Echo & the Bunnymen, Robyn Hitchcock, The Velvet Underground, Love. Music leaves a strong imprint on your brain at that age.

    That doesn't mean I became totally closed off to new music after a certain age, or that my tastes didn't continue to evolve. There are also certain things I liked at that age that make me cringe now (U2 being a prime example). But the music I discovered at that time certainly has an outsized influence on me compared to the rest of my life.
     
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  8. Jose Jones

    Jose Jones Outstanding Forum Member

    Location:
    Detroit, Michigan
    Me too! I was into the original Quarrymen heavily....back in the banjo and tea-chest bass and washboard days. Then they sold out and got electric instruments and starting getting replacement members :(
     
  9. Exile On My Street

    Exile On My Street Senior Member

    Location:
    Long Island, NY
    Well said.

    I don't think any of the music freaks that inhabit forums such as this could be considered "average" when it comes to music listening and our preferences.


    I do think this study represents the average male or average music listener.

    I don't consider people like the many here, myself included, who spend hours a week on a music forum discussing topics like this one, to be average in any way when it comes to music.

    For most people here their tastes are continuously evolving.

    The average person doesn't keep up with music or even explore any of it outside of what terrestrial radio shoves down their throats. There is a reason radio has the playlists that they do.
     
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  10. Brian Lux

    Brian Lux One in the Crowd

    Location:
    Placerville, CA
    My interests in music are vastly broader than they were when I was 14. But then when I was 14 I hadn't heard all the stuff I've heard since then and I might well have liked in then if I had. In fact, it might even have taken me less time to warm up to stuff back then.

    For me, the data don't matta.
     
  11. Terrapin Station

    Terrapin Station Master Guns

    Location:
    NYC Man/Joy-Z City
    But are those people only listening to what they listened to when they were 13-16 or whatever? I know people whose musical diet largely consists of radio, people who are very casual listeners and don't have much of a record collection at all, but they're not just listening to "oldies" stations.

    I honestly can't think of a single person I know who only or primarily listens to the music that they became familiar with in their mid teen years. Heck, unless they're hardcore music nuts like lots of us, they probably didn't have more than 50-60 albums worth of stuff that they were familiar with from their mid teen years. How many people are going to listen to the same 50-60 albums for 30-40 years? They're either going to move on/expand a bit, or they're just not going to bother with music.
     
  12. Jose Jones

    Jose Jones Outstanding Forum Member

    Location:
    Detroit, Michigan
    The thread has become misunderstood----the point is not that people only listen to the music they heard when they were 14; it is that they carry their affection for that music throughout their life.
     
  13. Jackson

    Jackson Senior Member

    Location:
    MA, USA
    I'm not so sure about that, it's certainly true of many people here, but for many others only if the word rock comes attached.
     
  14. frummox

    frummox Forum Resident

    Location:
    New York
    Still listen to Beatles and Stones, probably always will. It's not that my musical taste is locked in the sixties, I've simply added to it through discovery. As a side note a lot of guitar players like to point to blues or jazz guys as who got them interested in guitar. But what got me playing a minute before the Beatles were the Ventures. I still listen to that stuff now and then.
     
  15. Talisman954

    Talisman954 Forum Resident

    Agree with this, but I think it’s 14 to 16.
    For me it was.
     
    Shaddam IV likes this.
  16. Bobby Morrow

    Bobby Morrow Senior Member

    I certainly still view the music I liked at 14 affectionately, even if some of it has dated poorly. I’ve also grown to appreciate songs I actively disliked then now.. There’s nothing like being young and discovering music... Whatever tosh you may have listened to then.:) You can love music all your life, but those early days can’t be beaten.
     
  17. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    Looks like your childhood was governed by graduations, rites of passages, or "permissions". Mine wasn't.
     
  18. EdogawaRampo

    EdogawaRampo Senior Member

    My core tastes were developed between the ages of 10 and 13 and the bulk of that music had been recorded years earlier (3 to 10 or s0). Little of it I heard on the radio, most on records I'd discovered. Guess I'm an outlier.
     
  19. Terrapin Station

    Terrapin Station Master Guns

    Location:
    NYC Man/Joy-Z City
    Wouldn't people who are likely to not "outgrow" music likely not outgrow music period?

    Certainly some people outgrow some music. And maybe some people do that regularly. Those folks keep moving on to new things, to the exclusion of older things.

    And then you'd have people who outgrow music that they loved when they were younger, but who kind of "settle in" to music that they moved to later in life. They move to the new stuff, ignore the older stuff, but stick with the newer stuff as they keep experiencing newer stuff.

    But the other option would be that people don't outgrow the music that they learned from 13-16 (or whatever the age range was), yet they do outgrow the music that they came to like later. That would be the only option that would make sense of noting that someone doesn't outgrow music they came to like in that age range--because if they don't outgrow music period, then there's no point in specifying the age range. But this option seems the most unlikely. If you're the sort of person who doesn't outgrow the music from your youth, wouldn't you tend to not outgrow music that you discover later, too?
     
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  20. Lemon Curry

    Lemon Curry (A) Face In The Crowd

    Location:
    Mahwah, NJ
    I'd like to think I've been aggressive about expanding my musical horizons through the years. I fell in love with Wilco and Lucinda Williams as "an older man".

    But.. it's true about those burned in memories. I saw Rust Never Sleeps on a special date night, and it forever has a unique meaning for me.
     
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  21. Dillydipper

    Dillydipper Space-Age luddite

    Location:
    Central PA
    Not "permissions"...the assuming of permissions, based on increased freedom, augmented by hormones; you keep leaving that part out. That is my basis for my corroboration of the theory we're supposed to be discussing here. Not whether or not you are an anomoly to the conditions surrounding the claim in general, effecting majority of universally-relevant factors that occurs within a significant and verifiable mass of respondents. "Hah-haaaaa! I am impervious to your little research project, for I was raised in a more permissive environment!"...is not the point. If true - and I have no way of corroborating your experience - again, it is the exception that proves the rule.

    "Most marbles are cats-eyes."
    "Well, that's not true, for I am a solid-color marble."
    "Well, we haphazardly throw a large amount of marbles out, and encircled them with this loop of string...and most of the marbles within, are cats-eyes."
    "Yeah, but...I've always been a solid-color marble."
    "*sigh* So: we contracted the Mathematics department of a large university, to duplicate the experiment on a much larger scale, and they arrived at the same result: most marbles are cats-eyes."
    "Then your study must be incorrect, because I just checked, and, see? I'm still a solid-color marble."
    :rolleyes: :shrug: :-popcorn:
     
  22. Champagne Boot

    Champagne Boot Ain't nothin' gonna break my stride

    Location:
    Michigan
    So how are we these days on the Dave Matthews Band? That's where I was at 14, on the verge of switching full time to Phish and the Dead.
     
  23. Exile On My Street

    Exile On My Street Senior Member

    Location:
    Long Island, NY
    There is a whole lot of over-analyzing taking place here.

    I think that age 14 is when you're being exposed to the most music for the first time, influenced by peers and whatnot so it makes sense that that is the age people tend to carry forward with them into their adult years.

    Of course there are exceptions, me being one of them. Maybe 5% of my listening is from music I discovered in 1984 or thereabouts, when I was 14.

    All of my favorite artists were discovered later in life or before age 10. My tastes from 12-15 or 16 are questionable because, without naming names, I have little to no use for the music I was actively listening to at age 14, with a few exceptions of course.
     
  24. 131east23

    131east23 Person of Interest

    Location:
    gone
    I gave away all of my Captain & Tennille albums because I don't like that music anymore. I'm not even fond of them. Sentimental about junior high? What a traumatic time that is for anyone. Can't imagine that data reflects reality unless it is just the average Spotify listener.

    Oh, and if the results of the Spotify data are as scientific as this Spotify prediction based on "Spotify data" then we can close this thread and move on.

    Spotify Predicts New England Patriots to Win Super Sunday
     
  25. Jrr

    Jrr Forum Resident

    Hmm.. .a good point when put that way. I wouldn't play most of what I listened to at 14, and probably most of the people in the room wouldn't either. Guess it just depends on what you liked, but for the most part it would likely be fairly current material. And age would be very critical to that. People in their 20's and 30's would probably be far more likely to play current material.
     
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