Middle Aged Man Doesn't Listen to New Music Anymore (AKA midlife non-crisis)

[Underseer]

I'm listening to the same shit I did X years ago. Nothing new for me. I used to think that old timers who only listened to old shit were lost and that I'd never become one of them. But I have. And it's fine.

And I think I've figured it out:

1. I've heard it all before in one form or another. I hear some band play something and I think, "You can tell these guys are Bowie fans." Or Sabbath, or whatever their influences are. But who does it better than the bands that invented it in the first place?

2. Catalogue: that is, I've got some 4.5 decades of music in my background... well, about 3.5 if you don't count the fact I've gotten into about one or two new bands in the last decade. The point is that I can go back to the 1960s and all the way up until a good decade ago to find bands and songs I like.

I've tried, and have run across some decent stuff, but it doesn't grab me anymore, and importantly, I don't care. Maybe I have low T. But even if I do, I sure as hell don't want to run around a horny as I was when I was young.

So yeah, I'll be in the old folks home listening to Iron Maiden. But somehow I don't think that creates the same image as old folks shambling around to Glenn Miller and Duke Ellington. At least I hope not.

You're missing they most obvious explanation.

Scientific studies show that teenagers have a stronger emotional response to the same stimuli than children or middle aged people.

So now you are middle aged, and you are wondering why music doesn't move you like it did when you were young.

A lot of middle aged people have similar misunderstanding about their relationships. They just don't feel the same emotional intensity, so something must be wrong. You and those middle age couples are simply reading too much into things. As you age, your emotional response diminishes even if the emotional stimuli remains the same.

 

[Keith&Co.]

I'm 54.5.

I have a pretty eclectic playlist compiled. Harpist music next to electronica, between soundtracks/scores, classical, Dr. Demento, pop rock...

I've never really cared what others were listening to, I listened to what I wanted.* Now I'm outside the demographics for the music on the Top 40. Big whoop.



*I was on the sub one field day, cleaning my space, when the chief saw my headphones and asked what I was listening to. I said, "sticks."
"Oh," he said, "I love Styx!" and took my headphones.
I was listening to a tape of two guys hitting sticks together at a set pace for 20 minutes. he handed me back my headphones with a weird look on his face.
"And on the other side," I said excitedly, "The sticks are made of OAK!"


Three months later, the tape player in my car devoured my Styx tape. I bemoaned the fate of the cassette in the office. Chief offered no sympathy until I spelled 'styx' for him.

 

[funinspace]

Three months later, the tape player in my car devoured my Styx tape. I bemoaned the fate of the cassette in the office. Chief offered no sympathy until I spelled 'styx' for him.

WTF...do you have a reel to reel music player at home

 

[Keith&Co.]

Three months later, the tape player in my car devoured my Styx tape. I bemoaned the fate of the cassette in the office. Chief offered no sympathy until I spelled 'styx' for him.

WTF...do you have a reel to reel music player at home

Not....anymore.

 

[ZiprHead]

Given I'm only 30, but I'm the opposite. All of the music I was listening to in my teens, and my early twenties? I've listened to it enough that I'm bored of it and crave novelty. Occasionally I'll go back to it after many years, but the revisit is usually short winded, and I'll soon be seeking out new sounds.

The problem I have is that after devouring all of the great stuff from the 60's through 10's in both the rock and soul streams, including a century's worth of jazz, and many centuries of classical.. is that there's just not a lot of novel music to listen to anymore, regardless of era.

So I can't imagine listening to the same 90's and 00's records for the rest of my life, but there's also not a lot of new stuff being put out that genuinely excites me anymore.

Big first world problem. Hundreds of years ago you were lucky if you had someone to play piano for you, now there's Spotify where you can listen to pretty much all music that has ever existed.

I'm sneaking up on my sixties and I'm the same way. I still crave newer (to me) stuff.

Here one that I've recently been turned onto.:
[YOUTUBE]https://youtu.be/hT3MFnOxNZo[/YOUTUBE]

 

[Opoponax]

Do you listen to anything other than well known pop and rock? Ever try experimental, or classical, or medieval, or anything other than mainstream stuff? Sounds like stagnation, and by the way, old guys shambling around listening to Iron Maiden are not so different from the ones shambling to classical jazz. (Face it, rock n' roll has been less about defiance and more about appearances since the 60s. Rap, an important and valid art form, has claimed that one for a while now, like it or not.) Ah, and speaking of classical jazz - there's another genre that might speak to your or inspire you or just entertain you if you didn't automatically associate it with being uncool or whatever.

Nothing personal. Just sayin.

Hate jazz. I understand it's intricate and complex, but it does nothing for me.
Rap does nothing for me. I hated it until someone pointed out the obvious by telling me that it wasn't for me. That is, I'm not the target audience, so of course it doesn't appeal to me.
I tried getting into classical a while back. I got a collection of CDs by the masters: Beethoven, Bach, Handel, and what his face, the guy from Amadeus... Mozart. I liked some of Beethoven, nothing of the rest.

But it's not like the quality of my life is suffering. That's why I'm fine with it.

As far as "cool" goes, I think that concern, with respect to music, passed out of my system at some point when I was 16 or so when, as a young metalhead, I decided that Tears For Fears was cool and fuck anyone who didn't like it.

- - - Updated - - -

I'm listening to the same shit I did X years ago. Nothing new for me. I used to think that old timers who only listened to old shit were lost and that I'd never become one of them. But I have. And it's fine.

And I think I've figured it out:

1. I've heard it all before in one form or another. I hear some band play something and I think, "You can tell these guys are Bowie fans." Or Sabbath, or whatever their influences are. But who does it better than the bands that invented it in the first place?

2. Catalogue: that is, I've got some 4.5 decades of music in my background... well, about 3.5 if you don't count the fact I've gotten into about one or two new bands in the last decade. The point is that I can go back to the 1960s and all the way up until a good decade ago to find bands and songs I like.

I've tried, and have run across some decent stuff, but it doesn't grab me anymore, and importantly, I don't care. Maybe I have low T. But even if I do, I sure as hell don't want to run around a horny as I was when I was young.

So yeah, I'll be in the old folks home listening to Iron Maiden. But somehow I don't think that creates the same image as old folks shambling around to Glenn Miller and Duke Ellington. At least I hope not.

You're missing they most obvious explanation.

Scientific studies show that teenagers have a stronger emotional response to the same stimuli than children or middle aged people.

So now you are middle aged, and you are wondering why music doesn't move you like it did when you were young.

A lot of middle aged people have similar misunderstanding about their relationships. They just don't feel the same emotional intensity, so something must be wrong. You and those middle age couples are simply reading too much into things. As you age, your emotional response diminishes even if the emotional stimuli remains the same.

Now that makes sense. The stuff I know and love, as long as I don't re-wear it out, can still really move me. But nothing new has that effect. Science, it's for apathetic middle age dudes too.

 

[bigfield]

My theory is that a lot of middle-aged people who don't enjoy new music spent their younger years listening to mainstream artists, and now the mainstream has left them behind. They have never made much of an effort to find music they liked because they were satisfied with pop and rock. This is particularly evident when middle-aged people list their favourite artists and it's just a handful of very famous artists and groups who still get played endlessly on radio stations catering to over-40s. It's no surprise that they can't find anything new.

Then there are people like my Dad who only like music they can sing along to, which rules out many entire genres.

 

[ronburgundy]

You're missing they most obvious explanation.

Scientific studies show that teenagers have a stronger emotional response to the same stimuli than children or middle aged people.

So now you are middle aged, and you are wondering why music doesn't move you like it did when you were young.
.

That is part of it, but I wouldn't say its the "most obvious explanation." The most obvious is something close to what the OP was touching upon. There is in fact far less "novelty" in "new" music today than 40 years ago, because the amount of possible uncharted musical ground decreases exponentially every year. The most obvious relevant fact about music is that there was no such thing as a music industry until about 1950, because it is the product of two intersecting recent technologies, standardized and cheap methods of distributing recordings and radio, without which few people would ever have heard 99% of what was being recorded.

When the "greatest generation" were middle-aged (around 1950), the music industry was in its infancy and the amount and variety of music they had been exposed to as teens and young adults with a tiny fraction of what teens in the 60's-80's were exposed to.
The music of the 60s-80's was fundamentally novel to everyone who heard it, but the industry exploded so exponentially that it has become harder and harder to create anything novel.

Around the same time as the birth of the "music industry" the electric guitar, bass, and modern drum kits were just coming to dominate music. If you were middle aged in that era, then almost everything being created was highly novel, so to be disinterested in it would require a rather strong disinterest in novelty. Qualitatively new musical styles emerged rapidly from R-n-B, ska, Rock, and urban electric blues in the 50s, to Soul, Funk, Reggae in the 60's, to HipHop, Disco, Acid rock, Prog Rock, Metal, and Punk in the 70's, to Rap, electronica, and alternative rock of the 1980s.

While there are connections among these, they are qualitatively distinct and would sound quite novel to the ear of anyone well versed in the genres that came before each one. While plenty of currently new bands may be very creative, hardly any are creating music that doesn't fit within these genres created from the 40s through the 80's, and even fewer are playing on instruments only popularized within the past couple decades, which was the case for many bands from the 40's (electric guitar) through the 80's (synth and other computerized instruments). The sub-genres labels being "created" today are mostly about marketing rather than identifying valid qualitative delineations (much like the relabeling of hipster neighborhoods).

 

[rousseau]

You're missing they most obvious explanation.

Scientific studies show that teenagers have a stronger emotional response to the same stimuli than children or middle aged people.

So now you are middle aged, and you are wondering why music doesn't move you like it did when you were young.
.

That is part of it, but I wouldn't say its the "most obvious explanation." The most obvious is something close to what the OP was touching upon. There is in fact far less "novelty" in "new" music today than 40 years ago, because the amount of possible uncharted musical ground decreases exponentially every year. The most obvious relevant fact about music is that there was no such thing as a music industry until about 1950, because it is the product of two intersecting recent technologies, standardized and cheap methods of distributing recordings and radio, without which few people would ever have heard 99% of what was being recorded.

When the "greatest generation" were middle-aged (around 1950), the music industry was in its infancy and the amount and variety of music they had been exposed to as teens and young adults with a tiny fraction of what teens in the 60's-80's were exposed to.
The music of the 60s-80's was fundamentally novel to everyone who heard it, but the industry exploded so exponentially that it has become harder and harder to create anything novel.

Around the same time as the birth of the "music industry" the electric guitar, bass, and modern drum kits were just coming to dominate music. If you were middle aged in that era, then almost everything being created was highly novel, so to be disinterested in it would require a rather strong disinterest in novelty. Qualitatively new musical styles emerged rapidly from R-n-B, ska, Rock, and urban electric blues in the 50s, to Soul, Funk, Reggae in the 60's, to HipHop, Disco, Acid rock, Prog Rock, Metal, and Punk in the 70's, to Rap, electronica, and alternative rock of the 1980s.

While there are connections among these, they are qualitatively distinct and would sound quite novel to the ear of anyone well versed in the genres that came before each one. While plenty of currently new bands may be very creative, hardly any are creating music that doesn't fit within these genres created from the 40s through the 80's, and even fewer are playing on instruments only popularized within the past couple decades, which was the case for many bands from the 40's (electric guitar) through the 80's (synth and other computerized instruments). The sub-genres labels being "created" today are mostly about marketing rather than identifying valid qualitative delineations (much like the relabeling of hipster neighborhoods).

Good post, and I'd add that since the early 00's it's become increasingly easy to listen to more and more music. There was a good long period there where most people of my generation could download 50 different albums in a single day, for free, to add to their music collection spanning upwards of a terabyte, which might consist of many hundreds of artists. Compare that with the box of records that baby boomers owned during their youth. So in the last 20 years music has also become a completely pervasive and ubiquitous aspect of our culture. Many people, especially office workers, can easily listen to it all day long. This is to the extent that the value of music is getting more and more diluted. To many people it's become background noise, rather than an artistic experience.

The reaction of the industry to this, to actually get people to pay for music, was to give them access to every recording in existence for an absurdly low price. This makes the above even worse as all it takes is a quick search to accommodate a new artist into the 'yea I've heard that before' category.

 

[Ford]

There was a good long period there where most people of my generation could download 50 different albums in a single day, for free, to add to their music collection spanning upwards of a terabyte, which might consist of many hundreds of artists. Compare that with the box of records that baby boomers owned during their youth. So in the last 20 years music has also become a completely pervasive and ubiquitous aspect of our culture. Many people, especially office workers, can easily listen to it all day long. This is to the extent that the value of music is getting more and more diluted. To many people it's become background noise, rather than an artistic experience.

In addition, the physical act of listening has changed.

Before the advent of file sharing and digital downloads, there was an "arms race" of sorts for quality of equipment. Whether you had a huge collection or a box of records, you also spent money on having the best sound system you could afford. Those of us around middle age remember the days of buying multiple components for your "stereo system." Tuners, amps, dual cassette decks, turntables, equalizers, and speakers of ever-increasing size and complexity. When the CD debuted, it was a great leap forward in sound quality. A relatively modest system would sound better just because the medium had changed.

Now, more and more people are listening to their music streamed at a marginal bit rate through their phone, or via a You Tube video played on whatever speakers came with their computer. The speakers (or ear buds) are so bad that the average listener doesn't even notice the drop in sound quality, and due to the compression, loudness wars, and data limitations of streaming, any sort of dynamics in the music are lost.

Now, get off my lawn.

 

[Playball40]

Wow, I find I like a lot of new music and still love my old stuff. When my son was in high school it was all about Hip Hop. When my daughter was in high school is was Panic at the Disco, Fall Out Boy etc (BTW - Panic has some great new music - love Death of a Bachelor). Now, my youngest are in middle and high school - love Twenty-One Pilots, Sleeping with Sirens, Bring me the Horizon & even some one offs like Nathanial Rateliff. I love new show tunes too, like Hamilton, Legally Blond, In the Heights. I still listen to classic rock (Bowie, The Who, U2 were some of my favorites) plus Elton John, Rod Stewart and others. Liked some 80's punk too and some non-definitive stuff like Regina Spektor, The Cranberries, Lord.....

I just cannot imagine not finding any new music appealing.....AND I'M OLD!

 

[rousseau]

There was a good long period there where most people of my generation could download 50 different albums in a single day, for free, to add to their music collection spanning upwards of a terabyte, which might consist of many hundreds of artists. Compare that with the box of records that baby boomers owned during their youth. So in the last 20 years music has also become a completely pervasive and ubiquitous aspect of our culture. Many people, especially office workers, can easily listen to it all day long. This is to the extent that the value of music is getting more and more diluted. To many people it's become background noise, rather than an artistic experience.

In addition, the physical act of listening has changed.

Before the advent of file sharing and digital downloads, there was an "arms race" of sorts for quality of equipment. Whether you had a huge collection or a box of records, you also spent money on having the best sound system you could afford. Those of us around middle age remember the days of buying multiple components for your "stereo system." Tuners, amps, dual cassette decks, turntables, equalizers, and speakers of ever-increasing size and complexity. When the CD debuted, it was a great leap forward in sound quality. A relatively modest system would sound better just because the medium had changed.

Now, more and more people are listening to their music streamed at a marginal bit rate through their phone, or via a You Tube video played on whatever speakers came with their computer. The speakers (or ear buds) are so bad that the average listener doesn't even notice the drop in sound quality, and due to the compression, loudness wars, and data limitations of streaming, any sort of dynamics in the music are lost.

Now, get off my lawn.

Yea, times are weird now. When I was a teen you wanted the best CD stereo. At age 15 I bought a player that could shuffle up to 60 cds, which was amazing at the time. Nowadays I have three sets of speakers, and a nice set of headphones that I run my phone into, or two Smart TVs to run Spotify out of.

I still have my 60 disc Stereo but it only acts as a receiver for my turntable (which I don't really use anymore), and as a radio. Ironically, 12 years later it still has better sound than all of my other equipment.

I'd rectify the problem but I'm at a point where I just don't really care about music enough to worry about sound quality, that and my Audio-Technica's are a decent enough choice.

 

[Opoponax]

My theory is...

Your theory is wrong.

 

[rousseau]

My theory is...

Your theory is wrong.

There are certainly many exceptions, but I'd guess the brunt of the boomer Bell Curve fits that description. They come from an age where all of the best stuff was on the radio, and most of them have never made the transition to music in the digital age. Hell there's even people from my generation who fit that bill.

Posters in this thread are not going to be representative, because hey.. we're at a Freethought forum, but you'll know someone who fits that bill when they tell you 'music sucks these days'.

 

[ZiprHead]

So how many song files do you people have in your collections?

Me, 7955.

 

[funinspace]

So how many song files do you people have in your collections?

Me, 7955.

My Synology NAS says 4598...

 

[ronburgundy]

Wow, I find I like a lot of new music and still love my old stuff. When my son was in high school it was all about Hip Hop. When my daughter was in high school is was Panic at the Disco, Fall Out Boy etc (BTW - Panic has some great new music - love Death of a Bachelor). Now, my youngest are in middle and high school - love Twenty-One Pilots, Sleeping with Sirens, Bring me the Horizon & even some one offs like Nathanial Rateliff. I love new show tunes too, like Hamilton, Legally Blond, In the Heights. I still listen to classic rock (Bowie, The Who, U2 were some of my favorites) plus Elton John, Rod Stewart and others. Liked some 80's punk too and some non-definitive stuff like Regina Spektor, The Cranberries, Lord.....

I just cannot imagine not finding any new music appealing.....AND I'M OLD!

The OP (and my own attempt to give a historical explanation for the phenomena) isn't saying that new music sucks or isn't appealing at all, just that little of it has sufficient appeal and novelty to bother actually buying it or seeking to add it to one's collection of recorded music.
There is nothing wrong with Fall Out Boy, its just they are so derivative of hundreds of bands that came decades before them. In contrast, some of those bands they are derivative of were ground breakers who created a qualitatively new sounds, which was much easier to do back when the music industry was still adolescent itself and the electric guitar was something that didn't even exist when their parents were young.

Think of it this way. A person in 1975 who said they weren't really into any music from the last 30 years was saying that they don't like pretty much anything other than classical, traditional folk music, and the early forms of acoustic country, blues and big band jazz.
A person who says that today can love virtually every genre of music and all the best examples of it, except for maybe "rave" music, which is a very valid thing not to like.

 

[rousseau]

Wow, I find I like a lot of new music and still love my old stuff. When my son was in high school it was all about Hip Hop. When my daughter was in high school is was Panic at the Disco, Fall Out Boy etc (BTW - Panic has some great new music - love Death of a Bachelor). Now, my youngest are in middle and high school - love Twenty-One Pilots, Sleeping with Sirens, Bring me the Horizon & even some one offs like Nathanial Rateliff. I love new show tunes too, like Hamilton, Legally Blond, In the Heights. I still listen to classic rock (Bowie, The Who, U2 were some of my favorites) plus Elton John, Rod Stewart and others. Liked some 80's punk too and some non-definitive stuff like Regina Spektor, The Cranberries, Lord.....

I just cannot imagine not finding any new music appealing.....AND I'M OLD!

The OP (and my own attempt to give a historical explanation for the phenomena) isn't saying that new music sucks or isn't appealing at all, just that little of it has sufficient appeal and novelty to bother actually buying it or seeking to add it to one's collection of recorded music.
There is nothing wrong with Fall Out Boy, its just they are so derivative of hundreds of bands that came decades before them. In contrast, some of those bands they are derivative of were ground breakers who created a qualitatively new sounds, which was much easier to do back when the music industry was still adolescent itself and the electric guitar was something that didn't even exist when their parents were young.

Think of it this way. A person in 1975 who said they weren't really into any music from the last 30 years was saying that they don't like pretty much anything other than classical, traditional folk music, and the early forms of acoustic country, blues and big band jazz.
A person who says that today can love virtually every genre of music and all the best examples of it, except for maybe "rave" music, which is a very valid thing not to like.

It's true, which is a new problem in the industry.

I follow Ted Gioia on Twitter who occasionally posts about musicians having trouble making a living anymore, but the thing is: by definition the amount of music to choose from gets bigger over time. Every year that passes produces music that all new music being made in the future is going to be competing with. So not only does the money going into the industry get diluted, but the sounds that are produced gradually fill more and more of the possible scope. Eventually people don't really need to listen to [x] [y] or [z] because [a] and [c] already did the same thing.

I would add, though, that even in 2017 I occasionally find superb and original new albums. It's rare, but it happens. (a good start would be Ted Gioia's lists that I posted above)

 

[blastula]

So how many song files do you people have in your collections?

Me, 7955.

My Synology NAS says 4598...

But what does your tape measurers say?

 

[funinspace]

My Synology NAS says 4598...

But what does your tape measurers say?

I think I got rid of my tapes and my last tape player some 15 years go...