Your Spotify Listening Age Is 77? That’s Cool!

This says something about music today. Artists who have stood the test of time are continuing to find new fans, and those young listeners aren’t embarrassed about it in a way that previous generations would have been. (You think boomer kids were bragging about an adoration of Glenn Miller?)

Also consider that a streaming service such as Spotify offers unlimited access to more than 100 million songs across all genres and eras. It’s infinitely easier for music fans today to explore than in the days when buying an individual album meant a real financial commitment to hear the songs contained within. The safe purchase was often what was being played on the radio at the time.

Streaming services also perpetuate listening habits. So when a listener discovers the Beatles (and some things never change; kids still love the Beatles), the platform will then offer up the Zombies or The Beach Boys or The Kinks.

To Margaux Eller, a medical student with the actual age of 24, her listening age of 74 was initially a shock. But in a text chain with friends, she discovered that her peers felt proud of their older tastes. And the friends whose listening age aligned with their real age? “One of my roommates, she got early 20s or something, and she was embarrassed.”

But what about our generations?

While many younger people are OK being labeled old musical souls, the inverse is often the case for those with long listening histories who don’t want to be seen as old fogeys.

Take Peter Rowan, a 68-year-old project manager for a record label. A few years ago, he began to hear good things about Haim, a rock band led by three sisters. But Rowan mistakenly thought Haim was somehow connected to 1980s child actor Corey Haim, so he didn’t pay attention. He was content listening to the music he grew up with: the Rolling Stones, The Kinks, Fairport Convention.

Then he heard Haim, and everything changed. “Oh my God, what is happening to me? I love this,” he remembers thinking. It led him down a streaming rabbit hole of other young female artists and female-fronted bands, including Addison Rae, Wednesday, Rosalía and Taylor Swift. Now, Rowan says, “I’m less and less interested in the heritage bands I grew up with.” Thus, Rowan was delighted when Spotify tagged his listening age as 21.

I got into the amusement of it all, too. On Facebook, my friends had fun comparing listening ages. Many were younger:

• Ed, a retired data entry specialist who’s 67, got 16.
• Scott, a poker player who’s 65, got 17.

But others scored older than their years:

• Alison, 48, a writer, had a listening age of 92, because she played lots of Tom Lehrer songs after he died in July.
• Michele, who’s 56, had the oldest age I’ve seen — 100 — because she listened to a lot of old-time blues songs after watching the movie Sinners, which is set in the Mississippi Delta in 1932.

These large age discrepancies are fun partly because they ignore a long-running parental precept: “Act your age!” Whether your listening age is much higher or much lower, you’re flouting societal norms. But for some (including — cough cough — me), our listening age isn’t much different from our actual age. I admit to being disappointed at my humdrum listening habits.

What does it all mean?

For Eric Weisbard, a professor of American studies at the University of Alabama, the significance of Spotify’s new algorithm isn’t in the precision of the calculation but in the way it shows whether you’re looking at the present or the past.

“There’s a divide. Some people who love music want most of all to get every bit of value out of a certain past moment they idealize beyond all else,” he says. “Other people enjoy following the story forward and seeing the twists and turns of how music moves ahead.”

Weisbard has a convincing theory about why some listeners want to hear and rehear the music of their youth: Blame it on the groin. “Music crystallizes the experience of being a teenager, and one doesn’t remain a teenager forever. But one does retain a fondness for recollecting that era, let’s say. Music stirs the primordial pot.”

Weisbard turns 60 this month, and he was surprised at his listening age of 16, no matter what Spotify says. “I, in no way, shape or form, consider myself a 16-year-old. I value the difference in the classroom, not coming off as a 16-year-old is pretty much all the authority I have as a teacher. And I don’t try to present myself as having teen taste.”