"You're so wrong, they mean new music," she said.
"Mngh rhgh mehg!" I said. Which made perfect sense in my head but considerably less when choked out through a mouthful of breakfast burrito.
She didn't answer that. She didn't need to. My incomprehensible retort had succeeded only in gently lobbing her the final word. It was game over. We both knew it.
She took what I swear was an emphatic sip of her coffee then said, "It's so obviously talking about new music."
I chewed with as much disagreement as I could muster. She went back to reading Canvas. Silence descended across the table. The conversation was over. "It's boring how people talk," Lorde sang on the cafe's stereo, "Making smart with their words again."
It was the freshly published results of a music survey that had indirectly ruined our nice breakfast. The tech blog Skynet & Ebert had been commissioned by music streaming site Spotify to conduct research into people's music consumption habits. They had mined the data, crunched the numbers, made a graph even, and come to the conclusion that once people hit 30 they stop listening to new music.
This is where the trouble began.
We didn't dispute the results. You can't argue with cold hard numbers. No, what directly ruined our breakfast was the survey's failure to precisely define the term "new".
My stance was any music you hadn't heard before qualified as new. To you, it's new music.
Her argument was straightforward: New music meant new music. New music did not mean old music. Drink coffee for emphasis.
Of course if one of us had bothered to simply whip out our phone and Google the survey the whole mess would have been cleared up straight away and I could have enjoyed my breakfast burrito a lot more than I did.
But then again, maybe not. I'm not much of a fan of crow.
Turns out the surveyors had indeed meant new music. As in music that has just been released. Not music that's as old as sand yet completely new to you.
More specifically they meant brand new music by today's chart-topping artists. They meant the Top 40 charts. They meant rubbish.
I jest, I jest. Put down your pitchforks, younglings. I'm just not a Top 40 guy but if you are then cool, whatevs. I just find a lot of it ear-tearingly awful. That's not because I'm over 30, it's because it's not my bag.
Most chart music doesn't connect with me and is highly successful in not trying to. For example, in my heavily mortgaged world the only person asking, "Bitch, where's my money?" is the bank. Yet I still appreciate and champion a great pop song when I hear one. The survey doesn't believe me though. I'm "musically irrelevant" because I'm not at school and don't like Top 40 ... lol.
What I really take umbrage at is the survey's claim that by age 33 that's it for you. You're musically "locked in". Doomed to a self-selected eternity listening and relistening to the songs of your yoof over and over and over ... How boring!
Okay, it may be true if you never got the whole "being into music" thing. That's fine. But if you did, then I don't believe you ever stop actively discovering. You can't help it.
Despite the factual horror of the survey's hard numbers and the frightening amount within my age I still actively seek out new music every damn day.
I'm sure I'm not alone. With online streaming it's so easy now, why would you not? Yeah, my current musical pilgrimage has me trekking through older stuff. But everything I spin is something I haven't heard before. To me, at least, it's new music.
The survey didn't want to know about that. Instead artists were assigned a popularity score with the results being extrapolated out from there based on Spotify user data. It was, quite literally, a popularity contest. A rigged one at that. Of course kids are gonna be sitting on Spotify listening to chart acts all day. Us oldies, we got shiz to do, man!
Perhaps a more honest survey headline would have read 'Adults don't listen to Top 40 acts much' rather than labelling us all "musically irrelevant" and ruining what would have otherwise been a very nice breakfast.
