That Year Rocks

How Age Influences Taste

I dream of pressing a button and hearing an amazing song every time 

Mostly I want to hear cool new songs, but sometimes old songs really make me smile. To make this button work, there are many things I need to know about the listener. A good place to start is at the beginning. 

We develop our taste in music in our teens. During this period our brain stores musical memories much more strongly than at any other time in our life. We forever feel a special connection to the music we loved in our youth. 

How does this work? At what age does it start? How does our taste change in this period? I built a simple web app to try to better understand what is happening here. 

Web App: http://ThatYear.Rocks

ThatYear.Rocks is an experiment to try to better understand how age influences taste in pop music. From Wikipedia and iTunes I collected samples of the top 100 songs for every year for the last sixty years in the USA. As you browse through the years listening to the music, the app measures your engagement with each song. I plan to map relationships between age and favorite years. 

We've been playing with it in the Shorthand office for a few days and it's been a lot of fun to use and remember. It has sparked some really interesting conversations about how music works.

Enjoy!

Stephen Phillips
@huntedguy

About Me

From 2009 I led a music startup called We Are Hunted. It was one of the first music charts powered by social media and was a popular tool for music discovery. It was later acquired by Twitter in 2012. I worked on Twitter Music in 2013/2014. Since leaving Twitter I've been thinking a lot about new models for music discovery. This story is part of a series I am writing exploring the past and future of music app design. Enjoy!

Stephen Phillips @huntedguy17 May 2015