The Pudding launched an online music challenge that's a lot of fun and contributes to data you may find quite interesting. How well do you recognize hit songs from the past 60 years? Enter your birth year and listen to what they give you.
This project is inspired by a YouTube trend where Gen Z’ers film themselves listening to Queen, The Beatles, and Led Zeppelin for, astonishingly, the first time.
I want to quantify this: music that I assumed was culturally pervasive, but in actuality has no reason to be revered by folks outside my generation.
That is, should I be surprised that someone born in the 2000s has never heard my childhood anthem, “The Sign” by Ace of Base?
Be aware that the algorithm gives you one decade at a time, and you may have to refresh to get a different decade. I recognized 200 songs from the 1960s before I figured that out. But persistence got me into the 70s, 80s, and 90s. I'm not going to try too hard to get into the 00s and 10s because it is apparent that my music knowledge fell off a cliff in the 1990s, when I began to work in country music (which is vastly underrepresented) and started raising children. More fun to be had is in the data you'll find scrolling down, that shows which generation is familiar with which songs. Try it, and you might surprise yourself. -via Metafilter
Update: They have changed the test, and you now get to select which decade you want to be tested on.
Even if you grew up in the US but listened to country radio you probably wouldn't know many of the songs they selected for the quiz.