This essay will reek of “physicist syndrome,” be warned.
This is also a snuck premise. If you don’t agree with the premise, that we become out of touch with the latest music scene as we get older, earlier than we do for other forms of entertainment, then this whole blog post is meaningless to you. That being said, let’s get into the theories.
Theory#1: Music has a very limited parametric space
Compared to TV and movies, music is limited to only audio. That is a tiny parametric space compared to video. I concede that the space is still practically infinite from the perspective of the listener, and one can always find something new in music. I am not proposing that we can’t enjoy new music because we would have already heard 90% of all possible iterations of a 5 minute audio track by the time we turn 30, that’s ludicrous. But I am saying that the smaller parametric space does cause “freshness fatigue” sooner than otherwise. Just like (here’s another snuck premise) one tends to be sick of poems earlier than one does of books.
If you have been listening to and discovering music all through your teens and 20s, you can probably “map” any new music to something you’ve already heard before. (See: Everything is a Remix) Of course, this will depend on how granular your mapping is, but regardless of your aural acuteness, the parametric space is still much more cramped than other forms of media. Because a song is just sound, and it’s usually just a few minutes of sound. It’s not that there isn’t enough space at a fundamental level, but for someone who has listened to “enough” music, the space tends to blur together. While tis “blurring” threshold is different for everyone, I reckon that for the same person, it is lower than the “blurring” threshold for books and movies, etc. The last few sentences are kind of repetitive.
Theory#2: Technological advancement in music is less apparent, or less in general
TV and movies, and especially video games, have been able to wow the audience with better and better technology consistently since their conception. For example, with CGI, drones and smaller cameras for never-before-possible shots, cheaper and cheaper memory cards for capturing footage for nature documentaries, etc. In comparison, the technology for making music has been arguably much less apparent to the consumer.
The technological advancement of music-making has been more about democratizing the process — to make it more accessible for anyone who wants to make an album with just a laptop and a mic. But the technology hasn’t really enabled any never-before-heard sounds. Any music that is being produced today could probably be produced decades ago, if the same creative mind existed back then.
So, there may be less of an apparent difference between music from different eras, and therefore less of a motivation for people to keep trying to discover new music — because there really isn’t that much “new” music to be discovered out there without having to “squint” your ears. There have also been tons of revivals, partly driven by the younger generation rediscovering older music because it still sounds “fresh.” It’s more difficult to say the same for movies, and less so for TV shows, and even less so for video games.
But I hear a counterargument: Sure, older people still watch TV and movies, but if I follow the logic of this argument, how do you explain the fact that older people play video games even less than they listen to new music?
Theory#3: Listening to music is not a social activity that extend to families
Most families don’t sit around and listen to an album as they do with TV and movies — at least not since the 60s. Listening to music is mostly a personal affair (similar to video games). Even when you go to concerts, you go to concerts with other dedicated fans, making music-sharing mostly an in-group activity, and there is relatively little social pressure or conventional pathways for a member from an out-group to join in. They will have to “discover” the music relatively independently.
This in-group out-group split for music is especially apparent between parents and their children. While parents and their children may share a similar library of TV shows and movies just from sitting on the couch after dinner, their tastes in music tend to be more siloed. Without the social convention to cross pollinate musical tastes across generations, once someone have moved onto a “family life,” aka becoming a parent, they can still stay more-or-less up-to-date with the latest movies and TV shows by simply hanging out with their children, but not so much when it comes to music. As a result, the parents become untethered from the current music “scene.”
The same non-family-social curse goes for video games. Although Nintendo has been successful in their marketing of video games as a family activity, that is an exception that proves the rule.
Bonus theory: The other side of the coin
The flip side of all this, is that younger generations also have a better appreciation of old music more so than they do for older movies or TV shows or video games.
Older music, unlike other entertainment art forms, can be easily introduced to a new audience because it is parametrically small (because of theory#1), for example, as a movie or video game soundtrack, or even as a sample in a new song.
The less noticeable technological gap between newer and older songs also creates an easier access point for the new generation (because of theory#2). According to an article from the Atlantic, most songs streamed on Spotify are “old” songs — because most songs are old songs. I reckon that there is not much discrimination when it comes to the age of the song among listeners of different ages. There are probably more teenagers who have listened to Billie Jean than those who have seen Godfather II. And I think this is a good thing in general — to have more otherwise segregated populations sharing more of experiences, etc.
I don’t have a flip side for theory#3. I guess having some space to develop your own unique taste in art is good training for the teenage brain?
Yes, this is all very hand-wavy and qualitative and speculative and will probably fail peer review.
