r/LetsTalkMusic

From my totally unscientific and highly biased point of view, I think this is one of the most persistent psuedo-scientific myths on the internet today. I've heard A&R people repeat this in a professional capacity as if it's a hard fact, I've seen it on reddit, and I often see articles in the news trying to confirm it with a new study.

The story goes that your brain stops developing at a certain point and that the music you listen to during its developmental stage becomes what you think is "good" and anything else becomes unlistenable noise.

I turned 32 this year, and my experience has been the exact opposite. It seems that with age I have become more attracted to interesting and challenging sounds, and my attention span has grown despite being notoriously short compared to my peers. A few examples:

At age 29 I suddenly got into cloud rap. For whatever reason it didn't hit me when it came out despite being absolutely huge in my friend group and pretty much the defining sound of my generation. I remember I was in highschool when Lil B went insanely viral with Wanton Soup and then a few years later Yung Lean put out Ginseng Strip 2002 and it got shared all over the internet. But when I was young my mind just wasn't open to these songs. Wanton Soup was too musically abstract for me to understand (the production was so raw!), and Yung Lean had layers of irony that went over my head combined with drug and violence references that just turned me off from his music for a long time. It wasn't until much later with age that I found perspective to listen in a new way and hear the emotion, power, and humor in these songs.

I couldnt get into the Smiths until this year. Their music just didn't resonate with me, and Morrisey's politics later in life were (and still are) a massive turn off. But with age I really appreciate the guitar and even Morrisey's depressed sounding obnoxiousness is honestly very charming and entertaining in that context.

I didn't really get into jazz until I was 30. I always respected the musicianship, but I didn't FEEL it until recently. The complex emotions and sense of presence just wasn't something I had the capacity for at a younger age. Yusef Lateef's album Psychicemotus is now an all time favorite.

Bands like Xiu Xiu and The Microphones, I was very aware of for decades as I've always been a fan of bands that cite these artists as influences, but these albums were just too intense for me. They are so intense and so raw. For some reason I started listening to this music just this year, and it really hit me and touched me emotionally and profoundly. These songs are very harmonically complex, there is no way I could have handled it at a younger age.

MF Doom is an artist I've always liked since I was a kid, but back then it was mostly just the vibes I liked. My brain genuinely could not comprehend the wordplay until much later in life, around my mid to late twenties, and that's when I really started to appreciate him as an artist.

Gojira just went way over my head in high school. I didn't listen to a lot of heavy music back then so it just went in one ear and out the other. But listening to them in my late twenties they became an all time favorite band.

I watched a Sun Ra documentary in high school and was always fascinated by his character and art, but I didn't connect emotionally with his music until more than a decade later. His solo albums including his rhodes piano performance are truly beautiful and underrated works of art.

Those are artists I heard at a younger age and couldn't get into but tried again at an older age and absolutely fell in love with. There are also artists I know I probably wouldn't have enjoyed at a younger age but that I've discovered recently and I absolutely LOVE: Suburban Lawns, Whale, Ulver, White Ward, Amon Amarth, and Photokem all come to mind. Also worth noting although it's not entirely music related, but Poppy's art genuinely scarred me when it first came out and now she is one of my favorite artists.

In short I'm having the biggest musical awakening of my life starting around 28 and continuing into my early to mid 30s. Considering the new layers of depth I keep hearing in music, I don't see this trend in my life stalling anytime soon. I know my story is anecdotal, but I'm curious to hear what other takes redditors have on this phenomena. Is it true? Is it a myth?

Hi everyone! I got this question in a graduate course I am taking and I'm curious to get input on it. We are discussing philosophically what is music so maybe if you want to explore that question. It's not necessary for survival, plenty of people don't listen to music or can't listen to music. But for a good bit of people it is such an integral part of human culture and expression. This has me really stumped.

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i've been thinking about this a lot lately and i genuinely can't shake it.

i was listening to fleetwood mac's rumours on vinyl last night and there's this moment in the middle of gold dust woman where you can hear the room. like the actual air in the studio. the imperfections in stevie's voice, the way the reverb feels organic and not processed. it sounds like humans in a space together making something real.

then i opened spotify and put on something from this year and it's technically flawless. perfectly compressed, mixed to hit right on earbuds, optimized for streaming algorithms. and i felt absolutely nothing.

i think what old recording equipment did was capture energy not just sound. tape saturation, room mics, analog warmth — all of that "imperfection" was actually just humanity leaking through onto the recording. now everything gets scrubbed clean in post and what's left is technically perfect and completely soulless.

is this just nostalgia bias or did something genuinely change about how music gets made and why?

I’ve been thinking a lot about how people rate music, especially after listening to Remain in Light by Talking Heads.
I enjoyed parts of the album:it’s very groovy, experimental, and interesting from a production point of view. But I also felt confused by the way it is often rated as a “10/10 masterpiece” in discussions about music history.
This made me question something:
Are we sometimes mixing up historical impact with personal listening experience?
Because for me, those feel like two completely different things.
An album can be:
extremely influential
groundbreaking for its time
important for shaping future music
…but at the same time:
not that emotionally engaging
not very memorable on a personal level
not something I would actively replay
And I think Remain in Light is a good example of this. It’s clearly innovative in how it uses rhythm, layering, and structure, but as a listening experience, I personally didn’t find it as impactful as other albums from similar eras.
This is where I get confused with ratings.
Should an album be rated based on:
how much I personally enjoy or want to replay it
its historical importance and influence
or a mix of both?
Because if we mix them, it creates a strange situation where an album can feel like a “10/10 masterpiece” in discussions, even if the actual listening experience for someone today might be closer to a 7 or 8.
And on the other hand, if we only rate based on personal enjoyment, then we ignore the fact that some albums literally changed music history.
For example, I feel like I could make a completely experimental album today with new sounds, and in 20 years it could be considered influential if it inspires other artists — even if it’s not necessarily enjoyable or memorable to listen to.
So I guess my point is:
Maybe we should separate ratings more clearly:
Personal score(how much I enjoy it)
Historical score (how important it is for music evolution)
Because right now, I feel like those two are often merged, and it makes it hard for newer listeners to understand why certain albums are rated so highly.
Curious to hear what others think about this.

Streaming sites are constantly removing artists without warning and it is getting frustrating to me. I have a large collection of music I own but I listen to a lot more online. Is anyone else in the same boat and considering moving away from streaming or apps? And I am not talking about Malcolm Todd here haha good riddance as far as I am concerned. Specifically I am thinking Hotline TNT, King Gizzard and THe Lizzard Wizard and Deerhoof

Saw a band live last year I'd been listening to casually. Never a die hard fan. Left a completely different person. Something about the room, the volume, the energy. Tracks I'd always skipped on the record became the best moments of the night. A great live show does that. Doesn't even matter if you're a fan going in. The right performance converts you on the spot. Has a concert ever changed how you hear an artist or made you a fan of someone you were indifferent about before?

So Tiktok is something I'll admit I'm very new to. I never did the Tiktok thing much until this year. And one thing I've learned when going on the app...

People REALLY don't like Jelly Roll.

Combined with his World Cup song, which sounds like AI made it (not an exaggeration) getting universally roasted, there are so so many viral Tiktoks of Jelly Roll hate that have 100k likes and up.

It seems like Jelly Roll has become our new "bad yet popular" artist. An archetype that nobody wants to be.

I've seen many compare Jelly Roll to Nickelback, and the hate he gets is pretty damn similar. We haven't HAD a Nickelback in a while.

The hate Nickelback got was a different lane than the hate that Justin Bieber got in the 2010s and the hate Taylor Swift gets this decade, where despite the massive backlash those artists recieved, their fanbases were as loud as the detractors (much louder than the haters in the case of Taylor Swift.) Drake fits in this category too.

Nickelback fans weren't that vocal about love for the band, which painted them as "the band everyone hates", despite their massive success leading them to outsell Kanye West and Coldplay in the USA in the 2000s.

And since Nickelback we haven't really had someone to match the phenomenon. Imagine Dragons came close but the hate for them never felt as big or irrational. Maroon 5 had more goodwill. Ed Sheeran was too nice. Sleep Token gets a lot of shit from the metal community but they're more niche by comparison.

But Jelly Roll seems to get a lot of the same intense backlash Nickelback got. The way people talk about him, his fanbase, is eerily similar.

They are not saying:

“His songwriting is formulaic.” “The production is bland.” “His country crossover feels forced.” “The redemption branding is overused.”

They are saying:

“The ick this dude gives me…” “If you like Jelly Roll I can’t take your taste seriously.” “Proud day 1 Jelly Roll hater.” “How did y’all let someone named Jelly Roll become famous?” “In 2 years he’ll be headlining county fairs.” “Why has he been wearing the same outfit for 10 years?”

That is not normal criticism. Every artist gets that. That's normal. What I saw written about Jelly Roll is social rejection wearing a music-criticism Halloween mask. That is where it starts to look like what we saw with Nickelback.

The Nickelback hate is largely a thing of the past, mostly because the band is largely irrelevant nowadays and 2000s nostalgia has softened their image, it's also working for Creed and Limp Bizkit. Hell, 2 years ago, Jelly Roll even duetted with Nickelback on stage at Stagecoach.

A passing of the torch right there...

Being the singer of a few bands over the years I've always found the brains of lead guitarists interesting. sometimes out right baffling. For example; Having multiple pedals that do the same thing on the same pedal board. How many overdrives do you need? Or Endlessly noodling instead actually learning the structure of a song. Then when you ask them about a change in the song they just show you a lick instead the chords.

I can think of many more, but I want to know what everyone else has experienced with lead guitar players they worked with.

Hi there, like the title says do you follow a singer or their sound? Apologies if this comes across a bit disjointed but I'm trying to form an opinion on whether my line of thinking is reductive so bear with me lol.

To give context I have been having a discussion with a colleague in work this week about Haley Williams and her recent solo album. My feelings on it is that to me its not Paramore and their response was along the lines of if you don't like Haley's solo stuff how can you like Paramore. Personally I dont think its only Haley's voice that makes Paramore's sound, I think that she is a part of it, but not the whole. Finding my taste in music during the 00s it was all bands so its it seems that with this generation of solo acts the attention is the individual and not the music. Just then it lead me to wonder if its normal to feel that one person cant make up the whole of a sound, if that makes sense. Like is Swift a sound or pop, is Johnny Cash a sound or just country.

Would love to hear some thoughts on this.

I’m well aware that both groups are British and the vocalists accents themselves are clearly British but I’m not sure why I get the idea that this is what popular German music sounded like during that era. Is there something to this? Was there German stylistic elements in their music? I can’t remember if it was something someone told me when I was younger about that style of music or if it’s just a completely made up assumption.

Had a discussion/debate with a friend over drinks last night and wanted to see what other music lovers had to say about it.

Do you think you would ever say someone has great music taste if their tastes are very different than yours? If so, what would you be basing that on? Or would you only say it if someone’s taste was similar to yours ? What qualifies as “great” music taste to you?

Thanks to anyone who shares their thoughts

I remember in sometime in the late 2000's and early 2010's pop music started to sound like electro-pop and club music. I think Lady Gaga and The Black Eyed Peas had something to do with it. A lot of people say that pop music is bad now but I genuinely think that the early 2010's takes the shit cake.

LMFAO, Kesha, some of the Black Eyed Peas music, Andy Grammar, Far East Movement (Rocketeer), Ylvis (What Does The Fox Say?), Silento (Whip and Nae Nae), Pitbull, Flo Rida, Taio Cruz, all of that shit was so bad and I don't know how people listened to it lol. On top of that there was this annoying hipster pop like Lumineers and Mumford and Sons that made me wanna blow my eardrums out.

Sure, every year has bad music but in the early 2010's it was REALLY BAD. But what did ya'll think about the music back then?

There's a lot of debate in this sub and others about the relative influence of various artists. Claiming that so-and-so is "more influential than the Beatles" is an especially popular line of attack, since it's a guaranteed way to spark engagement but also (in certain cases) just defensible enough to inspire some real debate. We've probably all seen the threads about how the Velvet Underground is more influential than the Beatles, Kraftwerk is more influential than the Beatles, etc.

I tend to find these arguments a bit tedious, since they usually seem to be rooted mostly in contrarianism, and it's all so subjective anyway. (Besides, I'm a big Beatles fan.) Still, I think there's an interesting sub-debate that often comes up in these threads, about what exactly "influence" even means in this context, and how it should be measured. I'll use the Beatles vs. the Velvet Underground as an example to illustrate.

The standard pro-Beatles argument is basically as follows: The Beatles were among the first to implement or at least normalize most of the techniques and procedures that have become standard in the western pop/rock recording industry. They wrote their own songs. They treated the album as a cohesive statement (and made one of the first concept albums). They wrote for the studio rather than the stage. They popularized the use of various previously-unconventional instruments or sounds on ostensibly "rock" albums (strings, sitars, backmasking, guitar feedback). They acted as a four-person team rather than a frontman with a backing band. The list goes on. Most will concede that they weren't the absolute first group to do most of these things, but they were definitely the biggest and the one that the most people paid attention to and took cues from. Any band today where the members write their own songs, play their own instruments, and priortize albums over singles is, essentially, following in the Beatles' foosteps.

The argument for TVU, on the other hand, would basically echo the famous Eno quote about how only 1,000 people bought their first album, but all of those people started bands of their own. In other words, TVU might not have revolutionized the way the industry works in the way the Beatles did, but through the decades their sound and general vibe have completely saturated everything. If you put on a random indie rock album today, chances are it sounds more like TVU than the Beatles. In fact, a band that sounds distinctly Beatles-esque (three-part harmonies, complicate chord progressions, jangly guitars, baroque instrumentation, "psychedelic" effects) will usually be noted as such, because these techniques are still pretty atypical (and hard to pull off without sounding kitschy or derivative). On the other hand, a band that sounds Velvet-esque is barely worth remarking upon, because every band sounds like TVU to one degree or another.

I'm not here to relitigate the Beatles vs. TVU or any other specific influence battle; the above is, again, just an illustration of a larger point, about how "influence" in the arts can mean different things in different contexts. Still, I think we tend to ignore this nuance during these discussions. We talk about "influence" as one all-encompassing thing, but then switch between different kinds of influence (industrial, technical, sonic, cultural) when it suits our particular argument. Most truly influential artists will have elements of all of these, but I'd argue that few are equally influential across every sector, and some are massively influential in one area while having barely any influence in another.

What do you think?

i've heard plenty of albums that don't really introduce anything new, but they're so well written and performed that i keep coming back to them. on the other hand, i've also heard albums with interesting ideas that don't quite come together because the execution isn't there.

if you had to choose between those two, which matters more to you? do you value an album that perfects an existing style, or one that takes bigger creative risks even if the results are uneven?

Music is perhaps the most "primordial" form of art, with our ancient ancestors likely having the ability to synchronize and harmonize before having the words to even label those "things".

It seems to me that anybody that has ever penned a "protest song" must necessarily believe - whether consciously or unconsciously - that it can function as a kind of practical reality-altering ritual.

Given music's potential to push the boundaries of what we consider ordinary or possible, do you believe it's fair to claim music has certain "magical" properties that can change the material world in measurable and observable ways?

Is art simply reflective of reality, or can it reciprocally shape reality through reflection?

Some simple examples of music's "reality-altering" properties off the top of my head:

- music's impact on motivation / endurance - anybody into any form of exercise can attest to the "power" of the right song at the right time.

- the spontaneous feeling of goosebumps / chills down your spine that can't be replicated by simply playing the same notes in the same order

- the ability to create wealth and command attention - artists possess cultural relevance that can then be used to influence others, sometimes on a massive scale.

Now to the skeptics among us there is nothing at all "magic" about those things, which can ultimately be reduced to and understood as simple physical reactions in the brain and body - but does the nature of transmission itself not imply a kind of invisible thread connecting consciousness?

So, do you think it's a fair assessment to think of all art as a kind of practical magic?

I've been thinking about how much the way we find music has changed. Curious how people here do it now.

A few things I keep wondering about:
- What's your main way of stumbling onto artists you end up loving?
- Do you rely on Spotify's recommendations to *find* new stuff, or mostly to replay what you already know?
- What's the most frustrating part of finding music you'll actually like?

And the one I'm most curious about: when you want "more like this song," what does *similar* even mean to you — same genre, same mood, same energy, or something harder to describe?