What the year you were born says about your music tastes

Find out the psychology of why you like the songs you like from your teens

In a quest to find if there’s a correlation between the year we were born and our music taste, New York Times contributor, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, found that our music taste tends to peak close to the end of puberty.

His analysis, which he carried out using data from Spotify, found that for men, the periods most crucial in forming their adult taste in music is between the ages of 13 and 16, while women—who tend to reach puberty earlier—are most influenced by music they discovered or listened to between the ages of 11 and 14.

Seth found, for example, that Radiohead’s “Creep” is the 164th most popular song among 38-year-old men. Having carried out a study of the American billboard’s chart-topping songs released between 1960 and 2000, he concluded that these people would have been around 14 years old at the time the song was released in 1993. But “Creep” isn’t even in the top 300 songs for anyone born a decade before or after 1993.

That could explain why people, like me, who were born in 1993/1994 are unashamedly attached to 2006/2007 gems like Stylplus’ “Olufunmi”, Paul Play’s “Angel of My Life”, and more interesting numbers like P-Square’s “Do Me”.

Featured Image Credit: Web/Edmtunes


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