Why Music Tastes Are So Personal

I have never liked a piece of music that another person has recommended to me. If someone asks me to listen to a song they like, I want to beg them, “Please no.” Not only will I not like it, but I will disappoint the person asking me to listen to it. 

Art in general is subjective. But music taste is particularly personalized. There are so many ways to compose a piece of music. And it’s interesting to explore why a piece of music resonates with one person over another. Or how you can hate a certain type of music but still leave room for exceptions. Below I try to explain why music tastes are so personal. 

Music related to feelings and memory

I once heard music described as the way feelings sound. That’s very true. Even if you haven’t studied music, if you can’t sing, or play an instrument, as long as you can hear the notes, it will tap into your emotions.

These emotions are also often connected to our memory. You may remember where you were when you first heard your favorite song. A song you don’t like might be related to a bad experience that you’ve had. There’s that recurring joke about your teeth hurting every time you hear the music your dentist played while filling a cavity. Music downloads itself into our subconscious. 

I think of that scene in Garden State where, upon their first meeting, Natalie Portman’s character, Sam, hands her headphones over to Zach Braff’s Andrew and says, “You gotta hear this one song. It will change your life, I swear.” In a way, the song does change his life. It sparks an interest in this girl which leads to his character rediscovering himself. However, it’s clear that their relationship with the song is entirely different from one another’s. They discovered it at two different times in two completely different situations. 

Playing music

Learning to play an instrument definitely fed my appreciation for music. Many of us grew up playing the recorder in music class. Some were more into it than others. Once we learned to read music, I remember a friend and I asking our music teacher for additional sheet music so that we could learn songs from The Lion King, squeaking them out on those annoying, whistle-like instruments. 

In the fourth grade, I started taking band where I learned how to play the clarinet. I kept it up for five years making friends with the other members of the band, and while I was a musician, they were some of my closest friends. It was amazing how that combined love of music was enough to form these personal friendships. When I quit the band, I drifted apart from those friends, even though we had interests beyond the band. But for some reason, it was no longer fun for me, and from then on, I was content to just listen to music rather than play it. 

I once heard a boy in high school asking his friends why people were into joining the band. He was a soccer player and was saying that soccer made sense to him because everyone practiced together and worked together to score goals and win games. Though I was no longer in the band, I wanted to interrupt and tell him that practicing for a concert, learning the songs individually and then coming together to each play our own individual parts to making this full, complete sound was just as gratifying as team sports. To this day, I still regret not saying something. But again, it’s something you have to experience for yourself. 

Musical taste

Music preference also has to do with taste. When you ask people what they like to listen to, their answer is usually “anything but…” (insert genre of music here). At the same time, there are exceptions to every rule. I’m convinced that every single hearing-abled person can find a song that they like in every musical genre ever made. I know I have. 

Personal music playlists can back this up. No one ever wants to put their music playlist on shuffle around a group of people. Immediately, the guilty pleasure songs all start popping up in the rotation, and then you’re left excusing yourself with an awkward, “How did that get there?”  Tina Fey includes a great chapter about this very experience in her book, Bossypants, where she writes about participating in a photoshoot where she handed over her iPod so that they could play music that she liked and the embarrassment she felt when they put the songs on shuffle and the certain songs that came up. 

Your music collection is like a diary. It shows your history, your thoughts, your feelings, and your musical evolution over the years. It’s sacred and needs to be protected. This is true whether you’re a monk who listens to death metal or a biker who listens to Beethoven. Our music tastes help to define our personalities to the outside world as well as inside. And we tend to be protective of those tastes. 

My musical history

Most of us have a soft spot for the musical era from when we were coming of age. For me, my musical exploration started at age 10 when my parents gave me an old stereo to put in my new room. Before that, I’d only listened to whatever cassette tapes or radio stations my parents put on in the car. Their music never really appealed to me besides its comforting association with family road trips. 

Upon receiving that stereo, I began to scroll through the FM radio stations. Eventually, I landed on my local pop station that played all of the hits of the late 90’s. I became familiar with the trendy songs and artists and found myself hanging out more in my room, fascinated by this audio world I discovered that drew me away from cartoons and toys and towards MTV and Seventeen Magazine. 

Getting a CD player for my 11th birthday introduced me to the music section of my local Best Buy where I would scan the shelves, making mental lists of CDs to request for my next birthday or Christmas or to buy myself with my newly-earned babysitting money. It represented growing up and becoming my own, independent person. 

Eventually, I gravitated toward the rock/alternative station and settled into the pop/punk, grunge, and hard rock world as my preferred genre. My musical tastes didn’t fit the nerdy student image that I presented at school. Everyone assumed I listened to classical music and watched PBS while I did my homework after school when really I was watching the top 10 countdown on TRL and hoping that my favorite songs at the time made the daily list. 

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Music criticism

Music allowed me to feel connected to the teenage world in a way that I felt alienated from at school. Teenage bullies search for reasons to pick on nerdy kids like me. So, I feared that everything I liked could be made to be uncool, just because I liked it. As a result, I kept my musical tastes to myself. I wore my rock t-shirts only on the weekends and kept the volume low on my CD player as I listened to music on the bus to and from school. 

I think of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character, Lester Bangs’ introductory scene, in Almost Famous as he paces around the radio station, bashing the rock bands he hates while putting the ones he loves on a pedestal for the same reasons that he trashes the others. He’s both the kind of critic that I feared exposing myself to and the kind that I envied for his unapologetic taste and deep, outspoken thoughts on the subject.

I’m not a fan of the actual music in Almost Famous. But I love that movie for the passion for music that it brings and both Lester and William Miller’s ability to write about it so deeply and gain admiration from those they most admire.

A few years ago, I went to a free museum in my hometown run by a man who worked in the music business. His entire collection was on display, and he was so enthusiastic to let us roam around and check out his own music history and the artists he loves. It was an inspiring place to see and a good reminder to hold onto those passions, whether you share them with the world or keep them to yourself. 

Evolution of musical preference

Despite being such a big music fan in my youth, my musical preference hasn’t changed much. I’m still discovering bands and songs from the late 90’s and early 2000’s that weren’t heavily played on the radio and MTV, if at all. Meanwhile, there are few contemporary, or even classic, bands that have seeped into my playlist.

Some music fans keep up with the current music trends throughout their lives. I know middle-aged women who can sing along to the latest hits on the radio. It usually takes me overhearing a song over the speakers of a store, restaurant, or event a year after its released before I realize that it even exists.

Others gravitate toward music that was released before they were even born. It crosses generations to still form that tight connection as a personal musical experience.

I like how personalized my music collection is and how it is a hidden place that I can retreat to, full of memories, thoughts, and feelings that fit me like a glove. Whether it’s the movie soundtracks that I listen to as a write or the high-energy rock songs that I listen to while I exercise or work around my house, it all represents a certain aspect of me and helps to fulfill a particular need.

Do you like to receive music recommendations, or are you like me and need to discover great music for yourself? What do you like to listen to? Leave me a comment, and let me know what you think!

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