Open-earedness refers to an individual’s desire and ability to listen and consider different sounds and musical styling. Research has shown that adolescents exhibit higher levels of open-earedness, with a greater willingness to explore and appreciate diverse musical genres. During these years of sonic exploration, music gets wrapped up in the emotion and identity formation of youth; as a result, the songs of our childhood prove wildly influential over our lifelong music tastes.
Weird, I feel like the older I get the more diverse my musical tastes have become.
On the one hand I have a similar experience. More then ever I love searching for artists with a sound that surprises me and that is engrossing.
On the other hand the top comment of every YouTube video of a popular artist from the past is “there has been no good music since [decades ago]”.
They should modify the saying “The only things that are guaranteed are death and taxes” to add “and older generations saying their music was the best”
I feel the same way. I’m appreciating genres I normally would have scoffed at when I was younger.
I’m almost 50 and my playlist has harry styles, Radiohead, Jacob collier, and ivy lab in queue.
In my 20s opera was my after party comedown music.
I may be odd.
Same. I’m 37 and I do regular playlist exchanges with my dad’s 70 year old friend (my dad passed away a few years ago and both of us strongly connected to him through music, so we decided to keep that going through each other). We’re both constantly seeking out new music.
My kids (early 20’s, out and about) are doing the same…I accidentally deleted an entire playlist and they gave me our cobbled lists to create one mega playlist.
Same! However I’m neurodivergent and the study is only talking about an overall trend among all people.
Research has shown that adolescents exhibit higher levels of open-earedness
I feel like this reasoning is a bit fallacious. By definition, ALL music is new when you’re young.
Sure, as a guy in my 50s, my typical shuffle playlist has like 30% of songs on it from when I was a teen, and another 30% or so from ages 20-45. But that’s because my musical tastes have grown somewhat steadily, but I haven’t stopped listening to stuff I used to like either. By simple statistics, the “variance” in my music selections has to go down over time, since I’m not discarding old music from my collection. Some kind of “regression to the musical mean” has to happen as you add more music without removing old music.
I guess there is a difference between childhood music from when children cannot independently choose the music they listen to and when they are teens and usually end up listening to “newer” music. The music my parents listened to or that was playing on the radio when I was young feels kind of wholesome. But the music that really happened to change me and that I identified with was the music I could choose on my own. And this was all “new” music (compared to the music of my early childhood) old people didn’t get or made fun of.
It stagnates when you rely on Spotify algorithms to find music.
I honestly couldn’t disagree more. Spotify’s exposed me to a huge wealth of artists I never would have run into otherwise. I’ll hear one song somewhere, pop it on Spotify, and end up getting into whole new genres. Some of what have become my favorite musicians I probably never would have heard without it.
It does suck that they’re not better to the artists who make them all their money, but I can’t really complain about the algorithm.
I guess it would depend on the person.
Same, it’s great
I find the Spotify algorithms work pretty well if I’m frequently feeding new music into it. But yeah, otherwise it can get stale pretty quickly.
I wish I could find a music streamer that wouldn’t glom onto whatever I’ve listened to previously and just start feeding me a constant diet of the same. I absolutely love finding new music, but Pandora and Google both narrow their play lists after a short time.
I like following people on bandcamp and then go through what they bought/wishlisted. There is so much weird stuff out there! Also, I like making Spotify playlists with chosic.com because the give me new stuff that is somewhat related. Once you find a new artist, they usually point to 2-3 other artists and then you get down a rabbit hole.
Spotify is really bad at recommending me music, everything they show me is around 1-2 minutes long only. No idea why :/
I listened to music before my time when I was young. Newer stuff to but I definately have a thing. progressive, new wave, alternative, its all really new generations of what I like but plenty of rock outside those bounds that is great. I tend to like rock with more instuments and interesting sounds. Not so wild about beat centric music or imsple melodies. So like rap, country, and pop are my antimusic.
