Play the album you loved at seventeen. You might remember the bedroom where you first heard it, the friend who insisted you listen, or the person you were trying to impress. Before the first chorus arrives, the song already has a history with you.
Now consider how you judge a new release. Perhaps you hear it while answering messages, give it half a verse and decide it lacks whatever the old stuff had. That may be an honest reaction. It is also a very uneven comparison.
Was music actually better, or were we just younger? Research suggests that age, memory and familiarity influence what we hear. They cannot settle every argument about musical quality, but they give us good reasons to examine how we reach our verdicts.
A 2025 study led by the University of Jyväskylä collected responses from nearly 2,000 participants across 84 countries, asking them to identify personally meaningful music. The researchers reported a concentration of meaningful musical connections around adolescence, with an overall peak near age seventeen. This pattern is known as a reminiscence bump.
The finding concerns personal meaning. It does not establish that songs associated with that age are objectively better, or that everyone’s musical taste becomes fixed at seventeen. It helps explain why music from a particular period can remain unusually important to us.
Think about an album you played through a first breakup or a summer with friends. Years later, judging its songs may be inseparable from remembering those experiences. Its emotional force belongs partly to the recording and partly to the life you have lived with it.
A new song has to earn a place beside music that already knows your entire history.
There is another problem with comparing eras: the past usually arrives as a selection. Put together a playlist of your favourite songs from the 1970s, 1990s or 2000s and you have already removed everything you found forgettable. Then compare it with a random selection of this week’s releases. The result tells you something about how you assembled the playlists.
This is the logic of survivorship bias. The songs that remain prominent can dominate our impression of an era, while the records we ignored disappear from the comparison. That does not make the classics any less impressive. It does make “look how many great songs they had” an incomplete argument about the quality of an entire decade.
A fairer comparison would put carefully chosen favourites from both periods side by side. Even then, your older favourites would have another advantage: familiarity.
In a 2011 study published in PLOS ONE, Carlos Silva Pereira and colleagues examined brain responses to familiar and unfamiliar music. In the small fMRI sample of fourteen participants, familiar music produced greater activity in several regions associated with emotion and reward. The researchers considered familiarity and liking separately.
That finding suggests a reason to be cautious about treating immediate emotional impact as a pure measure of quality. It does not mean repetition will make you love any song. Familiarity and preference are different things, as anyone who has endured an overplayed track can tell you.
Still, there is a practical implication worth testing: give a promising new record more than one distracted encounter. You already know where your favourite singer takes a breath and exactly when the drums return. An unfamiliar recording has had no time to develop that relationship with you.
Of course, people also fall in love with music made long before they were born. A teenager discovering an old soul record is an obvious challenge to the idea that musical preference is simply nostalgia for your own youth.
A 2013 study by Carol Lynne Krumhansl and Justin Adam Zupnick offers part of the explanation. Alongside connections to music from their own lives, young adults showed peaks in responses to music from their parents’ generation. The authors described this as “cascading reminiscence bumps” and suggested that exposure at home helped transmit these connections.
That leaves plenty of room for discovery, too. You can hear an old recording for the first time and admire its songwriting, sound or performance. An explanation of nostalgia should help us understand taste, without dismissing every preference for older music as a psychological trick.
Music itself changes, and some listeners have clear reasons for preferring particular periods. You might favour a certain vocal style, the sound of a rhythm section, more space between instruments, or a particular approach to lyrics. Those are specific qualities that can be discussed and compared.
Broad claims that music has simply become worse are harder to establish. In a 2015 analysis of US chart music from 1960 to 2010, Matthias Mauch and colleagues found no evidence of a continuous move towards musical uniformity across that period using their measures of diversity. Their study concerned particular features of chart recordings, rather than all music or an objective scale of artistic worth.
That distinction matters. Complexity, diversity, technical skill and emotional impact are different standards. A simple song can be deeply moving. An intricate performance can leave you cold. Before declaring one era superior, it helps to say what you value and which music you are comparing.
It also helps to notice how you listen. Did you once sit with an album because a friend loved it, while now expecting an unfamiliar artist to win you over immediately? Have you been exploring the genres you care about, or judging new music through whatever happens to reach you?
Try a modest experiment. Ask someone whose taste you trust for one recent album. Give it a few attentive listens on different days. Keep whatever interests you, and move on if nothing does. You owe no artist your admiration, but curiosity works better when it has a little time.
At Kallitone, we care about giving unfamiliar music that opportunity: a chance to be heard and judged by people willing to listen. The artists who matter to you now were once names you did not recognise.
You can keep every record that shaped you and still leave room for another. Years from now, a song you discover this week might remind you of the life you are living today.
Which album takes you back to being seventeen—and what was the last new album that made you feel something comparable?