I thought about trying this, but thinking about how to execute it already sounds painful enough.
For input data, I could use my existing library of mostly individually-selected songs, currently at size 1,662. Since I mostly listen to everything, this spans a rather large range of dates.
Then start taking random songs, and rating them on 1 - 10 scale in relation to entire library, enter ratings into 10 year buckets, and use mean of those ratings.
Probably 5 ratings per bucket to keep it short.
Unfortunately, I most likely can't fill every bucket, hell, some would remain empty. After all, classical music makes my library likely start in late 1600s, and end in 2025.
I didn't think about that. Perhaps I could leave it out, and start at, say 1920s, but that would make the data incomplete.

Problem is, I don't have the years for most of them, so that would mean looking up release dates for those individually.

Huh, what if everyone would absolutely love (old) classical music, but we don't see a spike as the graph starts at age of -40?

Keep your statistics to yourself, I'm over 40 and love discovering new music.

Nostalgia needs to go back to its old status as a form of mental illness.

as if this chart had the centuries of data needed to be meaningful

Well there have been scientific studies showing music became more shitty.

I think it's exposure, you hear about a lot more music in high school. Now I get exposed to new music mostly by the radio (you can throw streaming algorithms in here) and it's shitty pop/rap music that they play. Like if my 90s exposure to rap was limited to Vanilla Ice then I wouldn't care for it either.

Notice the graph peaks in the teens, when most people's fun and social life also peaks. I was an introverted high school nerd and barely remember the music from that time, then in my late 20s got into doing theatre - suddenly had a thriving social life full of parties, dating, friends, fun... now it's decades later and the music of that era is by far my favorite.

This phenomenom is observable in other areas and explains a lot of the "old good, new bad" online discourse about movies, games, and other media. You could even apply it to a major pilitical party.

Man I must be an outlier apparently, I don't listen to any of the music from my teens or even my twenties except in rare nostalgia trips. I'm constantly finding newly released songs that I like and even cringe at some of the music I liked as a youth. I don't think I can even define an era of "best music" - there're so many great songs across all music.

They grabbed 1 song from the top 10 (excluding top 3 to avoid mega-hits) for every other year. Here's the songlist used for the study:

I went to the paper and if you're struggling to interpret the x-axis like I was, the paper labels it "song-specific age" i.e. the age the person rating the song was when the song was released. Y axis is "standardized musical preference".

I'm in my 30s and a lot of my favourite music came out recently. My music tastes keep getting weirder and weirder.

The new Boards of Canada album came out a few days ago so I have no idea what this chart is taking about.

I read that deliberately alternating listening to one new song between two to four already known songs is supposed to be a good exercise for the brain. (Don't remember where I read that, maybe I should exercise my brain more.)

Only most people.

Some of us keep listening to new music throughout our lives

New stuff isn't tied to memories from youth though

No fate but what we make. You can put in the effort to keep your mind and your ears open. Absolutely worth it IMHO.

Not just music! (Though that is probably the strongest example)

It's telling how many people are nostalgic for a society that only existed before they were born. Recent History education sucks.

I tend to listen to music from before i was born, but then again that's the music I listened to in my formative years.

When I was a kid I only listened to music from the 80s and prior.

As an adult I started finding other genres of more contemporary stuff that I actually liked, but as a kid my only exposure to "modern music" was the bullshit top 40s pop music radio stations that they would play on the school bus, and I hated that stuff with a burning passion.

Even when there was an occasional song that I found catchy, I felt very conflicted inside and would never admit to liking it...

Bro I smashed the shit out the like button for angine de poitirne, and I don't even think they're human. How do I have nostalgia bias for music that isn't from this dimension?

Obviously biased data, I'm not in it. >:(

The music industry, such as it is today, is nothing. It was getting super fucked in the 80s, had a last gasp in the 90s and now it’s nothing.

The former pipeline of label to radio to charts is dead. Whats left is a necrotic accounting and marketing mechanism driven by algorithms and viral splashes.

Statistically, sure, but I’m forty and I keep finding new bangers.

Pop music now is better and more diverse than it ever has been. And I say this as a 45 year old

You just gotta know where to look. Music is an industry, so the people who view songs as products will push their favored products in front of as many of their target demographic as possible. They want those tween-to-twenties locked down. They decide what's cool, so if they like your products then you're cool. So if you're 40 and only listen to top 40 pop stations, you're probably in for a bad time since none of that shit is really trying to court you in the first place. I'm in my mid-late 30s and I'm still discovering bands and current releases that I'm into. Just gotta look a little harder.

I think that as we get older and consume more media, we experience a sort of fatigue of simple and easy structures, so we desire something more complex. But we grandfather in the stuff that we imprinted on in those formative years, and that's why that younger demographic is targeted; they'll keep coming back to their comfort media for their whole life.

Pop music is (usually) the middle ground between nursery rhymes and something like djent or cool jazz or math rock or whatever other more nuanced genre you're into. "Products" in those genres just aren't gonna sell like boy bands do. Some pop music is actually good and complex, but it's just not my thing and mostly never has been. I'm not trying to insult people who like Bad Bunny or Kendrick or whatever, but yeah Black Eyed Peas and Kid Rock fucking suck. Don't @ me.

ALL Americans are exactly this?