When you're young, you can pick up a new topic, sleep on it and be better at it in the morning. When you're older with all sorts of cruft in your head, this ab

When you're young, you can pick up a new topic, sleep on it and be better at it in the morning. When you're older with all sorts of cruft in your head, this ability retards. Music can "un-clog" but only to a certain extent, it needs some plasticity to function in the first place. If you have just enough but not an excess of plasticity, then new music (really, new sensations) will be almost impossible to integrate. Plug this into disdain for a civilization winding down on its basic tenets of family and community, and you get complete disinterest in whatever's new. And anyway, there's quite enough music to last one's lifetime. Some people don't feel like they need new music at all.