Spotify has been analysing how their users listening habits change over time and have used some fancy and complicated algorithms to identify that 42 is the age where many people experience a musical midlife crisis.

That’s the age where many Spotify users rediscover their love of pop music according to the streaming service’s statistics.

A statement from Spotify said: "During the teenage years, we embrace music at the top of the charts more than at any other time in our lives.

"As we grow older, our taste in music diverges sharply from the mainstream up to age 25, and a bit less sharply after that.

"We're starting to listen to 'our' music, not 'the' music. Music taste reaches maturity at age 35. Around age 42, music taste briefly curves back to the popular charts - a musical midlife crisis and attempt to harken back to our youth, perhaps?"

The overall statistics were collected together as part of a study from Ajay Kalia, the person who is in charge of overseeing Spotify’s taste profiles project which seeks to identify user’s tastes based on the music they listen to.

Kalia’s research also goes in to the differences between men and women and how having children can also influence the music we listen to.
“While teens’ music taste is dominated by incredibly popular music, this proportion drops steadily through peoples’ 20s, before their tastes “mature” in their early 30s.

Men and women listen similarly in their teens, but after that, men’s mainstream music listening decreases much faster than it does for women.

At any age, people with children (inferred from listening habits) listen to a smaller amounts of currently-popular music than the average listener of that age.”
All of these findings are very interesting but there is a deeper significance to doing this kind of research in the first place. Spotify is under a lot of pressure from its competitors; other streaming services such as Tidal and Deezer that are pulling out all the stops to make sure that they emerge top of the pile. By being able to get inside the heads of its customers, Spotify can give better recommendations and that should give them the edge they need in an ever more competitive market.