I've heard it said that your music taste basically freezes in time around the time you're twenty-five years old and that you'll basically listen to the same stuff for the rest of your life.  That's partially true for me I think.  All of the bands that I would consider all-time favorites are stuff that I was listening to up to about the age of twenty-five.  I will say though that I don't listen to my favorites all that often anymore.  I've heard them so much that it's not like I need to revisit them every day now.  

I'm constantly checking out new stuff and I have found things that I like pretty well, but I don't think I've become super obsessed with or passionate about any band I've discovered post twenty-five the way I did with a lot of bands before that time.  And my general tastes have largely solidified.  A lot of the new music I like still falls broadly in the same genre of what I liked when I was younger.  

On a semi-related note, I was thinking the other day about how everyone has pretty much every song in existence available at their fingertips these days.  Overall I think that's probably a good thing, but I can tell it affects me personally in how I engage with music.  I have a lot less patience now than I used to.  If I'm checking out something new and it doesn't grab me pretty quickly I'll move onto something else and I may or may not ever return.  

In the old days, I was limited in my listening options to either what was being played on the radio (I avoided this option like the plague) or what I physically had in my possession.  I amassed a pretty large CD collection back in the day, so I had a reasonably wide variety of options, but there was still a limit to what I could choose from, and a pretty big limit as compared to every song ever recorded.  For me personally, having that limit was sort of a good thing.  It meant I was willing to spend a lot more time with records and really get to know them.  And even though the price of CDs was honestly criminal, the fact that I plunked down up to like $18 made me more well-disposed towards albums.  I had skin in the game, so to speak.  I made a sort of financial investment so I wanted it to pay off, and thus I really, really wanted to like what I had bought.  Every once in a while that still didn't work out and I ended up buying some stinkers, but at the same time I found a lot of things I did like and was helped out by being predisposed to wanting to like it.  Nowadays if I can hear stuff for basically free, I've got no added incentive to want to like it.  If it doesn't grab me quick, there's so much more to move onto.  

I really think that contributes to my not feeling as passionate, but it's also kind of interesting to note that the increased availability of music online kind of coincides with around the time I turned twenty-five.  I wouldn't be surprised if those two things worked hand in hand to slow my roll a little bit.  Plus, the older I get, the sillier it feels to hero worship rock stars.  I enjoy the music and everything, but I'm not sure it's a great idea to be taking life advice from some drug-addled dude in his twenties.