“I wanted to make the greatest rock record that I’d ever heard, and I wanted it to sound enormous and I wanted it to grab you by your throat and insist that you take that ride, insist that you pay attention, not to just the music, but just to life, to feeling alive, to being alive.”
If you’re 33 or older, you will never listen to new music again—at least, that’s more or less what a new online study says. The study, which is based mainly on data from U.S. Spotify users, concludes that age 33 is when, on average, people stop discovering new music and begin the official march to the grave.
The study’s author reached this conclusion by slicing up tons of Spotify user data, as well as artist popularity data from another site called The Echo Nest. If you’ve ever wondered “what is the end game of using online databases to catalog my every musical, cinematic, culinary, sports, and pornography preference?”, this dizzying chart offers a small preview:
In this visualization, teens rest at the center of the nebula, listening almost exclusively to top Billboard hits and blissfully unaware that some rando is collecting data on their favorite jams. But age forces an outward spiral, as those teens turn to twentysomethings, begin exploring their options, and start making cool indie playlists for each other. After that, taste levels off and begins a long stasis, right as folks hit their mid-30s.
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