Kids these days are listening to more songs from the good old days

With Mexico about to host a raft of World Cup games, the zeitgeist moving on from a recent “Star Wars” movie, and Michael Jackson storming the charts, you’d be forgiven in 2026 for thinking you’d gone back in time to 1986.

As a buzzy biopic moonwalks the King of Pop back into the mainstream, Jackson’s “Billie Jean” recently topped both Spotify’s global streaming chart and the Billboard Global 200 more than 43 years after its initial release. But, zooming out, lists indicating the most listened to songs today are increasingly populated by some of the biggest tracks of yesteryear.

Throw it back

A new article in The Wall Street Journal unpacks how the latest generation of music listeners are now congregating around songs from the past — from early ’10s Justin Bieber hits to niche ’60s bops — citing data company Luminate’s Retro Revival report, released Wednesday.

In a survey of US consumers aged 13 to 24, Luminate found that 44% of respondents last year said they listened to music from the 2020s the most of any decade, down from 55% in 2021; at the same time, a quarter of this cohort reported most often listening to music from the ’90s or earlier.

Though the 2020s remained the most popular music era for young people, the report also indicates that the ’90s was the fastest-growing decade by streams, rising 8% from Q2 2024 to Q2 2025, with 64% of the US general population surveyed saying they listened to music from that era, more than the ’80s (58%) and the 2020s (53%).

Spotify echoes the throwback trend: in the first four months of the year, roughly one in every three streams on the platform went to songs at least a decade old, with about one in six streams going to a track at least two decades old, per the WSJ. A company spokesman called 2026 “the most nostalgic year” the world’s biggest music streamer has ever seen.

Tracks of my years

The instantaneous, boundless nature of streaming, giving users access to over a century of music, lends itself to discovering some of the classics, at least compared with the bygone routines of purchasing vinyls and CDs informed by new releases, radio playlists, and record store inventories.

For Gen Z, the mechanism of discovery is no doubt fueled by social media, which sees vintage songs turned catchy sound bites fast become chart-topping hits, with the likes of Radiohead, Coldplay, and Fleetwood Mac all blowing up on TikTok. Even with a resurgence in nostalgic listening, viral tracks are often transient and, looking at the most streamed songs on Spotify according to data from Kworb, the music of the moment is still overwhelmingly current.

Of the top 500 songs by total streams on the platform, 462 were released after 2010, and only eight tracks predated the turn of the millennium. (The highest-ranking of those was, naturally, Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You.”) While hot songs have tended to only get hotter on Spotify since its 2011 US launch, particularly The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights,” only one song from 2026 so far has made the cut; at present, the year 2023 contributes the largest chunk of the list, at 54 songs.

However, as some audiophile parents and the kids who’ve stolen their old iPods might attest to, multigenerational music listening tends to happen across artists’ catalogs, rather than in-vogue earworms played on repeat — and Spotify’s top artists represent a far broader discography over time.

Of the top 500 artists on the platform by monthly listeners, per Kworb, corroborated with album data from Deezer, only 255 artists released their first album after 2010, with 115 having released an LP before 2000. In fact, 15 of those artists make the top 100, including MJ in fourth overall.

There are plenty of previous studies to suggest people tend to prefer the music of their own generation, with taste stagnating in our teenage years. But in 2026, as more listeners look for a foil to an endlessly expanding well of AI music, the past could be the best place to shop for future hits.