Your love for discovering new music stops at 33, and yes, 33 is now officially my new scary number. I know what you’re thinking, sitting there, sneering as you read this, professing to yourself that I am wrong, I mean, who the hell am I to tell you when you’ll stop being cool, that’s your kids job! Or if you don’t want kids, your nieces and nephews job, or any annoyingly optimistic young person’s job really.

But it’s true, there’s been a study to prove it, there’s been a study to show when your musical life is over. You’ll reach 33 and you’ll turn into one of those people, those people who can’t begin a sentence without saying “In my day” every time you hear a new tune. This will happen. But don’t blame me, let’s blame Skynet and Ebert, the pricks who figured this out and decided to let everyone know.

The study looked at the streaming preferences of Spotify listeners mainly from the U.S, and concluded the following. Your love for new music actually starts to decline in your 20s, and “matures” or peaks, by the time you reach your 30s which just means you’ve reached the point in your life where you can’t be arsed to follow the latest music trends. This also seems to happen much faster for men than it does for women.

So if you’re a man in your mid 30s and you happen to be a father of a  tween, than their taste in popular music will not only confuse you, it will also annoy the shit out of you before it annoys your wife/partner; which will probably give you the shits even more. The study  also showed women were more likely to experience a “slow and steady decline in pop music listening from 13-49” , whilst  men dropped quickly starting in their teens and continued until their early 30s when they experience what’s been called a “lock in” effect or “taste freeze” if you prefer,  in music. In other words men get to a stage where they decide to stick to the music they know and like and flip the bird to the rest.

But how does this happen? Why the sudden shift away from popular music at 33? The study gives two possible reasons. Firstly by the time you reach your 30s you’ll discover less familiar music genres, this means you won’t recognise what’s being played on the radio, this will irritate you, as you’ll have no idea who’s fucking singing and you won’t be able to relate as easily to the music.

Which leads to the second reason, as new music begins to frustrate rather than excite you; you’ll habitually go back to listening to the days of old, shit that was popular during your formative years, music that would be out of favour with the bright young things of the world, making you look like the biggest dag. But you won’t care, because it’ll take you back to your happy place. The exact reason you feel in love music in the first instance. Now stop reading this and go turn up Nirvana so loud that the walls bend and someone calls the cops.

-Bise