Why Don't I Understand Pop Music Anymore?

After analyzing the results of a survey sent to my readers, I have a better sense for how our taste in art evolves as we age.

A few months ago, I sent out a survey to my readers and Instagram followers that was focused around three questions:

1. What was the last television show you loved enough to recommend to someone else?

2. What was the last movie you loved enough to recommend to someone else?

3. What was the last album or song you loved enough to recommend to someone else?

This week, I want to dive into the 574 responses that I received and what I think they tell us about how our tastes change as we get older. As an additional note, I want to remind you that you can gift someone a subscription to this newsletter. Just click the button below. You can even choose when it is delivered! Paid subscribers get access to at least four additional posts per month, along with my entire archive.

Tell Me Your Favorite Song, Grandpa!

It’s considered conventional wisdom that people discover less music as they grow older. Even if you were a pop music aficionado in high school, you probably fell out of touch with the zeitgeist by the time you turned 35.

My gut told me that this conventional wisdom was true, but I wanted to do a little research to find out how trustworthy my gut was. That’s why I conducted this three-question gut-check (i.e., survey). But before I dive into the survey results - which turned out stranger than I was expecting - I want to note who was surveyed:

• The survey garnered 574 responses between August 3, 2023 and November 21, 2023

• 75% of respondents were male

• Though respondents hailed from 39 countries across six continents, 86% were from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia

• 51% of respondents had at least one child

• Respondents ranged in age from 15 to 84, but 48% were over the age of 50

Why do I tell you this? Because the sample of people who responded to this survey are not representative of the general population. While there were a wide range of respondents - from 18-year-old Moroccans to 84-year-old Canadians - the average respondent was a middle-aged parent from the Anglosphere. So, we can’t make some grand claims based on these results. Nevertheless, there are still some interesting things we can learn.

First, people who responded to the survey are avid music fans. That’s not shocking. If you filled out the survey, you either follow me on Instagram or subscribe to this newsletter. You probably wouldn’t do either of those things if you didn’t like music. So, if this survey can teach us anything, it can teach us about audiophiles.

With that in mind, I wasn’t shocked that, independent of the age of the respondent, most answers to the question “What was the last album or song you loved enough to recommend to someone else?” were releases from the last few years. We had a 53-year-old American jamming to rapper Noname’s 2023 album Sundial. We also had a 69-year-old Frenchman vibing with November Ultra’s 2022 release “novembre”. That’s some serious contemporary variety.

But I began to notice something odd as I dove into these audiophiles’ responses. Though those responses were often contemporary, very few were songs by contemporary pop stars. Furthermore, the few that did answer with music by contemporary pop stars were often younger than 30. In short, older respondents were still discovering music to some degree, but that discovery was focused on obscurities or late-career efforts from stars of yesteryear.

While that observation intrigued me in its own right, it became more intriguing when paired with the other two questions in the survey, namely “What was the last television show you loved enough to recommend to someone else?” and “What was the last movie you loved enough to recommend to someone else?”. Though older respondents seldom mentioned contemporary pop stars, they often mentioned popular television shows and movies that were made in the last decade. Here is a set of answers from one respondent born before 1950 that illustrates this point:

1. What was the last television show you loved enough to recommend to someone else? - Succession

2. What was the last movie you loved enough to recommend to someone else? - Interstellar

3. What was the last album or song you loved enough to recommend to someone else? - The Wall by Pink Floyd

The HBO hit television show Succession was in production from 2018 to 2023. Christopher Nolan’s box office smash Interstellar debuted in theaters in 2014. Though Pink Floyd’s The Wall was also popular upon release, it was released in 1979, when Christopher Nolan and Succession showrunner Jesse Armstrong were both nine-years-old.

For the record, I take no issue with that person’s answers. I love The Wall, Succession, and Interstellar. But those answers represent an interesting pattern present among many of the audiophiles surveyed.

• Should we continue to discover new music as we get older, it is less likely to be contemporary pop music

• Despite the aversion to contemporary pop music as we age, we still feel compelled to check out popular movies and television shows

I’ve been ruminating on these two ideas for a bit, and I think they are best explained by two factors that I have respectively dubbed the Gleason-Romano Transformation Timeline and the Law of Diminishing Listening Circles.

The Gleason-Romano Transformation Timeline

During the last few years of my grandmother’s life, she lived with my parents. At the time, I was also living with my parents. Because of that, we’d watch an assortment of sitcoms together, like The Honeymooners, The Golden Girls, and Everybody Loves Raymond. Though this felt very natural, I soon realized how strange it was.

The Honeymooners came on the air and was one of the ten most popular sitcoms in 1955. Everybody Loves Raymond went off the air in 2005 and was likewise one of the most popular sitcoms. Despite 50 years between the start of The Honeymooners and the end of Everybody Loves Raymond, things really hadn’t changed that dramatically in the sitcom world.

Scenes from The Honeymooners [left] and Everybody Loves Raymond

Sure, you had your family sitcoms evolve into workplace sitcoms and then friend-based sitcoms, you had the rise and fall of the laugh track, but Ray Barrone - the titular character in Everybody Loves Raymond played by Ray Romano - was not wildly different than Ralph Kramden, the male lead in The Honeymooners portrayed by Jackie Gleason.

Now, compare the television of those two eras to the music. According to Billboard, the top songs in 1955 were by artists like Perez Prado, Mitch Miller, Pat Boone, and Frank Sinatra. In 2005, top songs were performed by the likes of Mariah Carey, Gwen Stefani, Kanye West, and Green Day. Whereas I could easily sit down and watch a contemporary sitcom with my grandmother and have it make sense to both of us, I can’t imagine the same would be true for music. Kanye West is just so much further away from Frank Sinatra than Ray Romano is from Jackie Gleason.

In short, I think that popular music evolves at a much faster rate than popular television and movies. Again, that’s not to say that television and movies have not changed dramatically in the last 50 years. It’s just to say that 3-minute pop songs seem to evolve at a faster rate than their counterparts on the big and small screen. Because of that, it’s easier to fall out of touch with popular music as we age while still having some idea what’s going on with movies and television.

The Law of Diminishing Listening Circles

Among the 574 respondents, a few people told me that my question “What was the last album or song you loved enough to recommend to someone else?” was a bit strange. “I don’t really recommend music to other people,” a few respondents recounted in so many words. Invariably, these were older respondents.

Growing up, you hear music in assorted social contexts. School. Parties. Bars. When you’re listening socially, there needs to be some commonality. Popular music - as the name suggests - is that commonality. It’s something that you can throw on and everybody will know.

Teenagers dancing at a social function in the 1950s

As we grow older, the number of places we listen to music, especially with other people, seems to diminish. If you’re listening in private, which seems to become more common, the only person you have to please is yourself. A 2013 paper in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology provides some evidence for this transition. They outline six tenents that capture how our relationship with music changes as we age:

1. The degree of importance attributed to music declines with age but … adults still consider music important

2. Young people listen to music significantly more often than … middle-aged adults

3. Young people listen to music in a wide variety of contexts, whereas adults listen to music primarily in private contexts

4. Musical preferences can be conceptualized in terms of a 5-dimensional age-invariant model

5. Certain music-preference dimensions decrease with age (e.g., Intense, Contemporary), whereas preferences for other music dimensions increase with age (e.g., Unpretentious, Sophisticated)

6. Age trends in musical preferences are closely associated with personality

Obviously, the scope of their analysis goes well beyond our analysis, but their first three points are telling: As we get older, music remains important to us even as we are listening to it less and often in private.

Now, compare this to how you watch television and movies as you age. Whether you are 5 or 85, you are likely watching television on your couch, either by yourself or with another person or two. Likewise, if you are watching a movie - independent of your age - you are almost certainly sitting in a theater or on your couch.

---

---

This was a survey of 574 likely audiophiles. As I stated at the beginning, we can’t use that sample to extrapolate general trends about how our enjoyment of art changes as we age. Nevertheless, those 574 responses have helped me piece a few things together.

Those responses have helped me understand that older people are still discovering music, albeit usually not contemporary pop music. Those responses have helped me understand why popular music is more difficult to keep up with as we grow older than movies and television are. And those responses have helped me understand that the readers of this newsletter have some great taste. Below you will find a playlist of some of my favorite music that they recommended.

A New One
"Something on My Mind” by Purple Disco Machine, Duke Dumont, and Nothing But Thieves
2023 - Deep House

Three artists that came up in the survey responses were Purple Disco Machine, Duke Dumont, and Nothing But Thieves. When I noticed that those three happened to put out a song together just a few months ago, I knew that it had to be the song that I recommended this week. Is this pulsing electronic track that could perfectly soundtrack a late-night drive my favorite that came up across the survey responses? No. But the coincidence of the three artists coming together after being independently recommended felt too coincidental not to highlight.

An Old One
"Radio" by Sylvan Esso
2017 - Indie Pop

The biography on Sylvan Esso’s Spotify page perfectly captures the Durham, North Carolina duo’s sound: “Pop music for feeling feelings”. When the shimmering synth washes over you at the beginning of their 2017 song “Radio” you can’t help but feel some sort of feeling. But what is that feeling? As the lyrics unfold, you find that that feeling is that if we only ever treat art as a commodity that we will often miss its beauty.

---

Looking for that perfect holiday gift? Give that music lover in your life a yearlong subscription to Can’t Get Much Higher, so they never commit the sin of musical commodification.