this is nowhere near enough data to make a real conclusion. there is no causal link explained here, merely a correlation. my anecdotal experience is that i now hate the music i listened to as a teen (RATM and SOAD mostly, with some nine inch nails etc. thrown in), my absolute favorite band was Thee Oh Sees for a while in my 20s, and now i’m almost exclusively into electronic music like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jn1Br5Zf6Xs&t=1503s

I’m glad I still play new music and find bangers, but I’ve always done that. Dont think growing old will stop me.

as if this chart had the centuries of data needed to be meaningful

I’m making an effort to listen to newer music by swapping albums with colleagues of younger generations (in return I get them to try records I’d just have assumed everyone has already heard). I like a lot of their recommendations but I don’t know if anything’s really going to stick. Maybe though!

I still find good music, but not nearly at the same frequency I did in the late 90s to early 2010s. Absolutely none of what I find good is played on the radio (but then, it’s like 80% commercials so I doubt much of anything is heard on the radio unless used in an ad); it’s all from films, games and memes now. A lot of artists I am into these days aren’t even known outside of Bandcamp, Spotify or TikTok where they post their music.

Much like every YouTube comment section for an SNL skit has at least 147 “SNL hasn’t been good since…” comments.

Of course 95% of the rest of the comments are literally nothing but them typing out a funny line followed by 🤣😂

Keep your statistics to yourself, I’m over 40 and love discovering new music.

I thought about trying this, but thinking about how to execute it already sounds painful enough.
For input data, I could use my existing library of mostly individually-selected songs, currently at size 1,662. Since I mostly listen to everything, this spans a rather large range of dates.
Then start taking random songs, and rating them on 1 - 10 scale in relation to entire library, enter ratings into 10 year buckets, and use mean of those ratings.
Probably 5 ratings per bucket to keep it short.
Unfortunately, I most likely can’t fill every bucket, hell, some would remain empty. After all, classical music makes my library likely start in late 1600s, and end in 2025.
I didn’t think about that. Perhaps I could leave it out, and start at, say 1920s, but that would make the data incomplete.

Problem is, I don’t have the years for most of them, so that would mean looking up release dates for those individually.

Huh, what if everyone would absolutely love (old) classical music, but we don’t see a spike as the graph starts at age of -40?

Mozart was actually peak piano tho

i find a lot of music i used to think was hot shit back in my heyday is Very Dated now, would not generally recommend

Notice the graph peaks in the teens, when most people’s fun and social life also peaks. I was an introverted high school nerd and barely remember the music from that time, then in my late 20s got into doing theatre - suddenly had a thriving social life full of parties, dating, friends, fun… now it’s decades later and the music of that era is by far my favorite.

I think it’s exposure, you hear about a lot more music in high school. Now I get exposed to new music mostly by the radio (you can throw streaming algorithms in here) and it’s shitty pop/rap music that they play. Like if my 90s exposure to rap was limited to Vanilla Ice then I wouldn’t care for it either.

I have a question about electronic music only.
Since it really exploded in the 80’s/90’s plenty genres have evolved.
But for me I can’t think of anything after dubstep in 2003 that is worth being called ‘new’.
Recycling and sub-genres at best.
Like everything has been done before. Does anyone feel this way or am I missing something?

Well there have been scientific studies showing music became more shitty.

Man I must be an outlier apparently, I don’t listen to any of the music from my teens or even my twenties except in rare nostalgia trips. I’m constantly finding newly released songs that I like and even cringe at some of the music I liked as a youth. I don’t think I can even define an era of “best music” - there’re so many great songs across all music.