How Our Music Taste Evolves with Age

Every music enthusiast can pinpoint the moment they realized they truly fell in love with music. Some might recall the time their parents took them to their first rock concert. Others might cite hearing their favorite song on the radio for the first time.

Once you have spent enough time listening to music, you might have figured out what your musical preferences or “tastes” are. As you get older, these tastes could shift and you might find yourself listening to music your younger self wouldn’t have enjoyed.

This might leave you wondering how exactly music tastes evolve with age. In this guide we’ll examine this topic and deduce what factors influence your music taste.

How Our Lives Influence Our Music Taste

To understand how our music tastes shift over time, we need to first acknowledge the way our lives influence our music taste. Music taste can be influenced by a wide number of life factors. For example, someone who works a hard labor job might listen to aggressive punk rock to keep them fired up and energized to get their work done.

This person might shift to softer and calmer music if they get a more relaxed desk job at an office. In this situation, the person’s job influenced their music taste.

In other cases, your peers might influence your music taste by exposing you to different kinds of music. For example, if you’re part of a social circle that consists of people who listen exclusively to jazz music, you might eventually get into it too after hearing your friends play it on their speakers at every gettogether.

You might not have enjoyed jazz music at first, but you could have become more familiar with it after hearing it over and over again. This repetition could have increased your understanding of the music style and caused you to gain an appreciation for it. If you moved to another city and began hanging out with people who attend electronic music festivals and raves, your exposure to this new type of music might then shift your musical preferences toward it.

Do Our Music Tastes Change With Age If Our Lives Stay the Same?

After reading the above section, you might be wondering if your music taste would change if your life stayed static as you grew older. In other words, would you still like the same music if you kept the same job and social circle for many years?

While some people do maintain their love for a particular music genre throughout their lives, most people’s tastes do shift even if their lives do not. This shift could occur if they eventually become bored of listening to a musical style that has nothing new or innovative to offer. Someone might get tired of four-chord pop songs and start gravitating towards a more complex genre such as jazz.

Enjoying Music at Every Age

As you can see, your music taste will definitely shift as you grow older. All the factors discussed above work in strange ways, so you might surprise yourself with the music genre or artist you get into next. Happy listening!