I think people get busy as they get older. Learning gets harder too, so hearing a new song either involves learning a new structure (more difficult) or is using

I think people get busy as they get older. Learning gets harder too, so hearing a new song either involves learning a new structure (more difficult) or is using the same constructs as they already know (boring). Also, most people are nostalgic for old music that was popular (to them) in their late teens and early 20s. For most people, this is when they had the most new experiences: learned to drive, had more freedoms, first kiss, first girlfriend, marriage, traveling, new foods, first job, moved out of home, got a house etc. And with all of this was music as the soundtrack. So the most exciting time of life is that period of life because literally everything is new, and therefore exciting. New experiences are good! Then as we get older we don't have many new experiences as we settle into living a life of conformity. It takes real effort to find new things, and most people are just too busy trying to survive or raise children to actually go and find something new. So that's my opinion on why people regress to listening to music they are familiar with - songs that don't involve forming new brain pathways or having to listen critically, and instead just listen to things they know which reminds them of more exciting (and perhaps happier) times when life was full of promise and new. Of course, there is also just a finite number of song combinations and most popular music uses the same scales (major, minor, mixolydian modes with infrequent straying into anything else), the same rhythms (no polyrhythms), and the same song structures (intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus x 2), so new stuff is both unfamiliar, and yet boring. If you attempt to introduce new music to people, most don't know what instruments are involved and instead listen to the melody or lyrics not textures or mix so can't extract anything good from a new song because they don't know how to pick out at least something from the song. I find some RnB horrible but at least the mix is interesting (other than deafening bass drums).