Interesting piece of research – the average age where we stop listening to new music is apparently around 33! However, is the music I listened to 20 years ago technicaly still not ‘popular’? This is a term that I have always struggled with in higher education – there being a clear difference between ‘pop’ music and ‘popular music (I try and make this clear to my students from day 1). On a different note, I am particularly interested if anyone has used the ‘Echo Nest’ service (http://developer.echonest.com). It looks complex – but would love to learn it at some point. Interesting post!
After sixty years of research, it’s conventional wisdom: as people get older, they stop keeping up with popular music. Whether the demands of parenthood and careers mean devoting less time to pop culture, or just because they’ve succumbed to good old-fashioned taste freeze, music fans beyond a certain age seem to reach a point where their tastes have “matured”.
That’s why the organizers of the Super Bowl — with a median viewer age of 44 — were smart to balance their Katy Perry-headlined halftime show with a showing by Missy Elliott.
Missy don’t brag, she mostly boast
Spotify listener data offers a sliced & diced view of each user’s streams. This lets us measure when this effect begins, how quickly the effect develops, and how it’s impacted by demographic factors.
For this study, I started with individual listening data from U.S. Spotify users and combined that…
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Paul Carr 