Ever notice how some people swear the best music stopped the year they got their driver’s license? Science might actually agree with them.

A new study from the University of Jyväskylä in Finland found that men form their deepest musical attachments around age 16, while women peak closer to 19. That small gap says a lot about how gender shapes the way we experience music during adolescence.

Researchers asked nearly 2,000 people across 84 countries to name a song that felt personally meaningful. They compared the participants’ ages to when those songs were released using Spotify data, then ran the numbers every way they could. No matter how they sliced it, the pattern stayed the same. Teenage boys hit their musical sweet spot a few years before teenage girls.

The difference seems to come

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