Open-earedness refers to an individual’s desire and ability to listen and consider different sounds and musical styling. Research has shown that adolescents exhibit higher levels of open-earedness, with a greater willingness to explore and appreciate diverse musical genres. During these years of sonic exploration, music gets wrapped up in the emotion and identity formation of youth; as a result, the songs of our childhood prove wildly influential over our lifelong music tastes.
I feel like this reasoning is a bit fallacious. By definition, ALL music is new when you’re young.
Sure, as a guy in my 50s, my typical shuffle playlist has like 30% of songs on it from when I was a teen, and another 30% or so from ages 20-45. But that’s because my musical tastes have grown somewhat steadily, but I haven’t stopped listening to stuff I used to like either. By simple statistics, the “variance” in my music selections has to go down over time, since I’m not discarding old music from my collection. Some kind of “regression to the musical mean” has to happen as you add more music without removing old music.
I guess there is a difference between childhood music from when children cannot independently choose the music they listen to and when they are teens and usually end up listening to “newer” music. The music my parents listened to or that was playing on the radio when I was young feels kind of wholesome. But the music that really happened to change me and that I identified with was the music I could choose on my own. And this was all “new” music (compared to the music of my early childhood) old people didn’t get or made fun of.