What’s your favorite song? Maybe it’s a classic, maybe it’s a forgotten B-side, a love song, a musical number, or something else. It is often said that it’s something we listened to as teenagers that we link to the strong emotions of those years. There might be truth to that, or at least we become less adventurous when we grow older. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

Researchers from several universities worked together to understand the relationship we have with music and how that changes with age. They looked at 40,000 users from music service Last.fm over the course of 15 years. The dataset contained over 1 million different songs, which have been played over 542 million times.

“In the study, we can follow how music

See Full Page