Evolution of My Music Taste

When I sat down to think about it, I found it pretty intriguing how my music taste has changed throughout my whole life. If you know me in person, then you probably won't be able to guess what genre I listened to growing up.

I feel like knowing what type of music a person likes can be a pretty good indicator of what their personality is. Judging people solely on the type of music they listen to doesn't paint their whole picture, but it can be enough to get a sense of a person's character.

In general, I didn't have too many music phases throughout my life, but I did want to go into how outside factors influenced my playlist.

Phase 1: Electronic Dance Music (EDM)

Yes, for a decent amount of time, I unironically enjoyed listening to EDM.

The main reason why I listened to EDM a lot in the first place is due to I had played a ton of video games growing up. In particular, I played a lot of first-person shooter games; think of games like Halo, Call of Duty, Fallout, etc.

You might ask why that even matters.

In a lot of these games, they would typically play some form of rock or EDM in the background while you're playing. You would most often hear them when you're sitting in the lobby of a multiplayer game, or when you're watching a cutscene in a campaign mission.

Having played hundreds of hours on each of these games at a young age and hearing this type of genre over and over again, it would be no surprise that I eventually would grow a liking to this type of music.

However, what I think had the biggest impact on why I listened to EDM a lot has to do with the YouTubers I watched throughout that period.

Naturally, playing video games would lead me to watch several gaming YouTubers in my free time. In many of their videos, their intros and outros would have a brief 5-10 second snippet of an EDM song taken from NoCopyrightSounds or MrSuicideSheep.

Alongside watching gaming YouTubers, I also watched a ton of gaming montages. This probably doesn't need much explanation, but basically, every montage had some type of EDM or rock song playing in the background.

When you add up all of these factors together, it's safe to say that because I had so a big gaming influence early on in my life, developing a taste in EDM is probably not so much of a surprise anymore.

Phase 2: Nothing

Nothing? What do you mean nothing?

Throughout high school, I listened to no music at all.

When I entered high school, I started to become more self-conscious and I began to worry about what other people thought of me to such a high degree. I don't know why I started to feel this way, but it had a lasting effect on me throughout high school.

Most of my friends at the time listened to rap. Some artists that they listened to were Lil Uzi Vert, Lil Baby, Gunna, Travis Scott, Juice WRLD, Playboi Carti, and the list goes on.

If any of them had asked what type of music I listened to, I would often be too embarrassed to tell them that I had listened to EDM in the past. In my mind, I felt like the stigma around people who listened to EDM was that they were always on drugs and that they enjoyed having a party-centric lifestyle.

I didn't want people to think that this was the type of person I am since in reality, I'm the complete opposite of that stigma.

So what was my solution to prevent situations like these? Completely stop listening to music. In my mind, if I told people that I didn't listen to any music at all, then they wouldn't make any bad impressions about me.

Now, if you're reading what I just wrote and thought to yourself, "Wow, that's a completely ridiculous reason," that's because it is.

I was so worried about what others had thought about me and I tried so hard to not make a bad impression of myself towards other people, to the point where I was afraid of simply being myself.

I never fully grasped the idea that no one actually cares or thinks about you 24/7 until I started going to college, but when looking back at it, I somewhat regret not fully being myself in a time where you're supposed to make mistakes and find out who you are.

Phase 3: Indie Pop and R&B

So now we're here in the present day, where my Spotify playlist is roughly 80% indie pop and R&B.

As I mentioned earlier, I started to embrace the idea that people weren't super judgmental about you when I entered college. I realized this when I began meeting more and more people throughout my first two semesters.

Whenever music came into the conversation, specifically, the type of music they listened to, I was surprised to hear that there were such varying genres that people listened to.

To give a few examples, some genres that people listened to were alternative, indie pop, rock, R&B, country, EDM, rap, heavy metal, pop, or even just simply everything.

It was kind of a breath of fresh air to hear that the people I had met didn't purely listen to rap but had a more diverse set of music to listen to. I think that hearing this made me more comfortable with expressing my musical taste since there was such a wide range of music that my friends had listened to.

Recently, I started getting into a lot of indie-pop artists. In particular, I started listening to artists such as Grentperez, Hotel Ugly, Clairo, Men I Trust, and Beabadoobee.

My most listened-to genre, however, is R&B with artists such as Frank Ocean, The Weeknd, Brent Faiyaz, Steve Lacy, Daniel Caesar, and Hojean.

Of course, there are a good amount of songs that I have in my playlist that don't fall into the R&B and indie pop genres. For example, I have a lot of songs by rap artists such as Kanye West, Drake, Kendrick Lamar, A$AP Rocky, and Kodak Black. There are also a few K-pop songs thrown in there by NewJeans and TXT that I enjoy listening to.

There are a lot more songs that don't necessarily fit the indie pop and R&B genre in my playlist, but the main thing that I wanted to take away when writing this is that it's okay to express yourself in whatever form you want.

I wish I had figured this out sooner, but you shouldn't be embarrassed or ashamed about such little things about yourself, such as the music you listen to in my case.

In general, it's important to be yourself and not let anyone else's opinions about you bother you to the point where have to hide bits and pieces of your personality to look good in someone else's eyes.

Thanks for reading! :D