Music Preferences: Why we have Different Tastes in Music
“And mostly all I have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, and force other people to listen to them, and get cross when these other people don’t like them as much as I do.” – Nick Hornby
Have you ever had the experience of sharing a favorite song of yours only to find that the person you’ve shared it with is a little less than enthused about it? It can be a disheartening feeling to share something you like and not receive the reaction you were expecting, however, the question about how we develop our musical tastes can easily explain why we may a better chance out of getting the response we are looking for when sharing our music with some people versus when we share our music with others.
We start to develop our music preferences after we’ve lived for about a decade. In our teen years, we also tend to latch onto and remember emotionally charged moments, and the music we listen to during these times will shape our preferences later in life. Our taste in music will revolve around what we were exposed to and branch off from there.
If you are sharing music you like with another you may have more success if you and the person you are sharing the music with had similar tastes in music growing up. Still, factors that influence our tastes in music are not only limited to when we were exposed to music at a particular age but also what type of music that was as well. A lot of mainstream music has a particular sound, if we only listen to the same types of music it can be very difficult to like other music types later in life because they may sound “off” to us.