Ask anyone for the music of their life, and most name the records of the years when they were about fourteen. Studies of memory and of what people play on Spotify say the same, and they say why. Below the article, type in the year you were born, or the year music first meant something to you, and the page picks the site's lists of those years.
13–14
the age at which the songs people play most all their lives came out
10–30
the years of their lives older people remember best
30½
the age at which most people stop looking for new music
14½
the commonest age at which a mental illness begins
Your years
Fourteen
In 2018 the economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz looked at how often Spotify's listeners of each age played the hits of each year. The songs people played most, decades later, had come out when they were thirteen or fourteen. The songs of the early teens counted for the most; those that came out when the listeners were in their twenties counted far less.
Psychologists call it the reminiscence bump. Asked about their lives, older people remember the years from about ten to thirty more than any others, and the music of those years with them. Morris Holbrook and Robert Schindler found in 1989 that the songs people liked best had been hits when they were about twenty-three; later studies, and the streaming data, put the peak earlier, in the teens.
Born in 1975, fourteen in 1989
Born in 1985, fourteen in 1999
Born in 1995, fourteen in 2009
Why then
A teenager's brain learns fast and rewards hard: what comes in with a strong feeling is kept, and no years have as many first times, the first love, the first friends of one's own choosing, the first evenings out. A song heard then is heard with all of it.
It is also the age at which people work out who they are, and music is one of the ways they say it: the band on the shirt, the tape for a friend, the crowd one belongs to. And the music is kept by being played. The records of those years are the ones people go back to all their lives, and each time they do, they keep them a little better.
Your parents' records
There is a second, smaller peak, from before one was born. Carol Krumhansl and Justin Zupnick found in 2013 that students knew and liked not only the songs of their own teens, but also those that were hits when their parents were young: the music heard at home, in the car and at family parties long before they chose any of their own.
Further back, the grandparents' records do the same, more faintly: the songs of their youth, played on at their houses, at Christmas and on long Sunday afternoons, for those who grew up near them.
When it stops
Most people stop looking for new music at about thirty. In 2015 Ajay Kalia, who worked at Spotify, found that its listeners stopped following the charts at about thirty-three; in 2018 a survey by Deezer in Britain put the moment at thirty years and six months.
It is less the ears than the days: work, children, fewer evenings with people who bring new records. Nothing in the brain closes, and those who go on looking go on finding.
When those years went another way
The years of the peak are also the years in which illness most often begins. A review of 192 studies in 2021 found that about a third of all mental illnesses start before fourteen and about half before eighteen, and that the commonest age to fall ill is fourteen and a half: depression, anxiety, eating disorders and later psychosis and addiction.
Depression takes the pleasure out of things, music among them. It leaves memories of whole seasons rather than of single evenings, and a song needs an evening to stick to. Whoever was ill, in hospital, alone or just getting through at fourteen may hear those years' hits as the ward, or as other people's parties, or may have no music of their own from then at all.
The peak can come later. It follows the years in which a life starts anew, not age as such: people who emigrated as adults remember the years after the move as others remember their youth, as Robert Schrauf and David Rubin found in 1998. Getting well can be such a start, and so can a first love at twenty-five or a town of one's own. The music of those years is just as much one's own, and the page below can start from the year music first meant something, too.
Sources
- Seth Stephens-Davidowitz: The Songs That Bind. The New York Times, 10 February 2018.
- Morris B. Holbrook, Robert M. Schindler: Some Exploratory Findings on the Development of Musical Tastes. Journal of Consumer Research 16, 1989.
- Carol L. Krumhansl, Justin Adam Zupnick: Cascading Reminiscence Bumps in Popular Music. Psychological Science 24, 2013.
- Ajay Kalia: Music Was Better Back Then: When Do We Stop Keeping Up With Popular Music? Skynet & Ebert, 2015.
- Marco Solmi and others: Age at Onset of Mental Disorders Worldwide. Molecular Psychiatry 27, 2022 (online 2021).
- Robert W. Schrauf, David C. Rubin: Bilingual Autobiographical Memory in Older Adult Immigrants. Journal of Memory and Language 39, 1998.