Why do most people's musical tastes freeze around the time they're 20?

...

Because most people don't spend a lot of time thinking about music. The ones who do have tastes that continue to evolve.

Nailed it.

http://daniellevitin.com/publicpage/books/this-is-your-brain-on-music/

one of the issues addressed in this book, it's a bit more complex than that

why mess with perfection

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Doz5w2W-jAY

https://31.media.tumblr.com/cb911de692c56d71b0c148e60d11bdf1/tumblr_mnjatn15br1qa9c43o1_500.jpg

i don't see a single chili dog there. also which one of those dudes is diane

my mom gave me levitin's book. "you like music, you might like this". i dutifully read it up to the point where he claimed that van halen's cover of "you really got me" was great because it made a song by the kinks, who were an incredibly uncool band, cool. after that i drove my car into a lake just so i could get rid of that book. i had to walk to work for a year after that, but it was worth it.

because there are only about 4 or 5 kinds of music really and by the time you're 20 you've heard some form of all of them

I would have thought around the age of 25 is more likely for the average person

I never bought into This Is Your Brain on Music.

Correlation does not imply causation.

But I'm paying attention.

And while I'm ready to agree that most people's musical taste do not evolve after their '20's', I would like to see some type of survey on this. I'm sure there is something to be said for regional cultural differences.

This Logan's Run hypothesis is complete bollocks, projecting your own apathy on the rest of the world.

Define "freeze".

Levitin sets the cut-off way too young.

What is understood is that “we all become fixed in musical taste by around age 14 or 15.” Until then, the brain has been making new connections like crazy, but after age 15 “the brain prunes out unneeded connections.” After that, “trying to like a different type of music is like trying to learn a new language.”

15? gtfo. At 15 I disliked pretty much anything made before 1976.

15 ? pish. I didnt even discover non-chart music til 18 and my taste is still evolving at 41

but it gets harder, i think. there's some superficial appeal to levitin's overall idea, even if his cutoff date instinctively seems too early.

At 14 I discovered the Pet Shop Boys, Run DMC and Mozart and since then I have never fucking stopped discovering. If the Op is trying to say we stop caring about music after two decades, then he is mistaken. It is a fucking ridiculous supposition to make.

Yeah I don't think he's saying you stop developing as a music listener, but in a different way. Before 15 I think I had a less prejudiced way of hearing music, it was less about signifiers and much more accepting. So it wasn't heavy metal or pop or techno really, it was just music - slow, fast, good tune, not so good tune. After 15 it would be more like 'wow so this is what dub reggae sounds like, I wonder why people like it? Do I like it? How am I supposed to understand it? Where is it from? Who made it?' Etc. I think even non music fans begin to make these distinctions to a subconscious extent by a certain age. I wonder if this isn't so much a neural thing as a sociolinguistic thing though.

No one on ILM really has a basis for using their own experiences as a counterpoint to the argument. We're obviously exceptions to a rule (that is, if we're to give the guy the benefit of the doubt here).

I don't agree with the idea, but it might be based on personality. When I was a kid I taught myself how to read so I could learn and discover everything I possibly could ... and the process is still ongoing. I keep discovering new music in my 30s and don't think I'll stop til I'm dead or I run out of new things to discover. Obviously this isn't all that common, but it's not like it's foreign to the human condition. Pitfall here is making sweeping generalizations about something that can't be summarized so easily.

Yes but if you're talking on a purely neurological basis, the science may suggest its true, much in the same way it's harder to learn a new language after a certain age - the brain stops being able to absorb language in the same way. You would have to teach yourself by force, through lessons etc.
I do find learning about new music a bit like learning new languages in a way, but I don't think I felt that way about it in early life - it was just there, I didn't really question, I just absorbed.

is somebody paying you to talk this shit? :)

Dude you discovered PSB only last year, who are you to judge?

xxp that's the whole fun of it, for me at least. the more difficult and foreign the better. not everyone's got the same "neurological basis", and i generally have deep skepticism whenever someone tries to claim great human truths from half-baked understandings of how our brains work.

PSB >>>> Animal Collective etc.

Xpost I haven't read his book so I don't really know of course. Not everyone's brain is exactly the same, no one's saying it is, but developments in the brain do occur in most people at various points in the human lifespan.
Discovering new music as an adult is fun, but if the writer is to be believed, then he's saying that the approach might have to be different to when you were a kid. I still think it's more to do with the acquisition of critical skills though, more than any physical development.

dunno, maybe i'm navel gazing here, i was exposed to a ton of different types of music growing up. i haven't read the book either so this whole debate here is pretty pointless. i'm going to smoke a cigarette now.

i have to disagree with poster #2. i don't think it's anything so erudite as thinking about music that develops our tastes. i think it's a matter of exposure. some people are allowed to stop developing their musical tastes at 20 because there is, or was, a ready-made culture industry that will feed the music from their teenage years back to them in an endless loop. you put people into environments where they're exposed to different kinds of music and they will find elements they like in that music, particularly if it's contextualized properly. even radio stations realize this now, and indifference or active hostility to narrowly-construed "genre" is much more prevalent now than it was twenty years ago.

as for the book, if you haven't read it, i would strongly encourage you not to do so. it really is risible.

I'd still like the OP to clarify what they're asking about, though. To go to one extreme, I don't think the majority of people literally continue listening to the same recordings that they were listening to at age 20 without adding anything new at all. The Levitin quote makes sense to me if he's talking about e.g. learning to appreciate Balinese gamelan music (or maybe even e.g. Baroque keyboard music) as an adult if you were mainly exposed to American pop radio until age 15. If people continue to listen to new Anglo-American popular music artists or even new 'genres' in the broader category of Anglo-American popular music after age 20, does that count as having 'frozen' tastes or are these listeners continuing to evolve?

The Levitin quote makes sense to me if he's talking about e.g. learning to appreciate Balinese gamelan music (or maybe even e.g. Baroque keyboard music) as an adult if you were mainly exposed to American pop radio until age 15.

Actually, even then, 'like' is a pretty problematic word. Liking a 'new kind of music' does not really seem equivalent to learning a new language. (I should probably go read the book to comment about Levitin specifically, though.)

the o.p. wasn't asking anything, it was faux puzzlement over the untutored masses

I've tried to strike a healthy balance between liking what I always liked and digging new stuff or digging deeper into the catalog but time, like gravity, gets us all in the end. It can tear down a brick and mortar record store or hack a woman's Facebook page.

I don't think the op was talking about people who post here, he's talking about why most people don't care about music, always an illuminating endeavor

Ha. Oh yeah, sure.

"why isnt everybody as obsessed about this thing as me?", jobs and babies and lawncare

D'oh!