system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Where does a specific person's "Musical taste" come from? And why do we grow bored of songs?
gpt
Big question, but here is one part of it:


Music is kind of a language, and kind of a game.


It's a language, in that there are a set of sounds that communicate information----you know that the dissonant violins in the Psycho scene scene aren't happy, for example. That's because that's a first grade level of communication in our culture. Things like the tempo, key, and chord progression all communicate information and make a song happy or sad or whatever. By the time you're a teenager, you're familiar with the idioms of music in our culture, and you would know that the lion king song "the circle of life" is positive, while the song "The Beautiful people" by Marilyn Manson is not, EVEN IF YOU'D NEVER HEARD EITHER.


But music is also a game, or a competition. Music is used to alter out enhance mood, and just like most mood altering substances, you develop a tolerance. This means that no matter how much you loved Eminem's "Lose Yourself", it begins to lose the power to move you as it once did.


This is where the competition lies---people are effectively competing to create the most effectively resonant new songs, by combining familiar idioms in new ways, and slightly altering existing idioms, in such a way that it still effectively communicates the intended feeling, while incorporating enough novelty to be maximally stimulating.


This is why people have genre favorites---the language you understand best, which therefore works best on you.


And This is why people lose interest in songs they like----the sings can no longer conjure the same feelings.


Older people seem to lose the ability to learn a new musical language that strays farther from the ones they adopted in childhood, hence growing musical tastes seem to stop for almost everybody by 30.


None of this really touched on how music is a component of a person's identity (example: you expect heavy metal fans to wear black, but don't expect strawberry ice cream fans to have, say, short hair cuts. Why?), but this is a major component of the why in this case.