Music Quizzes - Is being older an advantage?

Today on Popmaster we had a contestant who had just finished university. On that basis I assumed she'd be in her early 20s and therefore wouldn't do very well. This proved to be true as she only scored 3.

She never gave her age as an excuse, but some contestants do say it was before their time which seems to annoy Ken Bruce, he always say's that's no excuse. As someone who's written and hosted music quizzes myself I've had people complain to me about the music being too old, and I'm inclined to agree with Ken, it's not like I'm going to ask their date of birth and ensure every question is related to music after that date. However it does raise the question of whether being old enough to remember the music gives you an advantage.

Back in the early 2000s there was a quiz on the BBC called "Test the Nation" and one of the shows was specifically about music. As the title suggested, this wasn't a quiz for contestants as such, it was a quiz for everybody to play along to. At the end your score was put into a category but this depended on your age group, the idea being to make the top category of "Music Genius", the older your age group the higher the score you need. This therefore implied age does give you an advantage.

More recently though we have a new music quiz on the BBC, "The Hitlist". In the most recent edition it was a grandad and his grandson who won. Sounds quite logical as you have the demographic to cover old and new music. Their victory though was mainly to do with the grandson, so that would imply being older didn't have an advantage.

However, what I did notice was that most of the questions the grandson answered correctly were modern ones so I thought I'd give it another watch and take note. They answered 21 questions correctly, grandad got 5 and grandson got 16. Of those 16 questions, 12 of them charted in 2015 or later and 3 of the remaining 4 charted in the last 10 years. Given the number of songs they skipped in the final round it's likely they would have struggled had it not been for the modern ones.

One thing that springs to mind from personal experience was when "Sounds Familiar" came to my workplace to do a music quiz. Me and a colleague who's known to like a quiz were on the same team and many thought it was inevitable we'd win. But we didn't.

The quiz rounds were 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s and recent hits. It was a point for the artist and point for the title. The problem was the older ones were very obvious ones such as "Stayin Alive" by the Bee Gees, the recent hits may have been just as obvious but none of us knew them. We got 100% on the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s rounds and got a pretty decent score on the 00s but flopped on the recent hits. Given that recent hits tend to be by everybody featuring everybody else, there were more points available on that round too. Therefore being young and knowing modern music proved to be advantageous.

In these too examples though it's only really proved that modern questions suit young people which is what you'd expect. But in reality they suit whoever follows modern music irrespective of age. Do older music questions better suit older people though?

Well recently I went on holiday and took part in 4 music quizzes. There was certainly a lot more older music than new, plenty of music from before I was born but after no doubt many of my competitors were born. We won all 4 quizzes though.

One time when I was 28 I went to a music quiz where everybody else was at least 50 and the quizmaster warned me that it would mostly be music before my time. We won that one as well.

It could be argued that learning about older music is easier than learning about modern music. Take an era of music such as the 70s, there is a finite amount of music from then, there hasn't been a new 70s record for nearly 40 years and there will never be another 70s record made again. If you weren't born then you've still had all your life to learn it. Modern music on the other hand keeps being made, if it came out last week you've only had since last week to learn it.

That said, nothing beats living through it. I can relive my life by going through many 90s artists singles discography, some of whom are now long forgotten. With a 60s artist it's always been part of the history books. The point of your life that relates to those songs is probably the point where you decided to listen to their greatest hits.

Is being older an advantage then?

The obvious advantage is living though an era means you can effortlessly remember many songs from that time whereas if you weren't born then you need to learn your history in order to know them. Therefore you are probably at a disadvantage until you've had enough time to learn your history, but once you reach that point it's probably more of a level playing field.