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Linkin Park at Nuremburg in 2014: Wikimedia Commons CC
Everyone's music tastes change over time; you might love an artist for years but wake up one day and not feel the same way you used to; on the other hand, an artist you've disliked for a long time plays in a memorable way, and now you find yourself somehow a fan.
I, of course, am no exception, and have recently found myself listening to music that my middle or high school self would never imagine listening to in the future; there have been a lot of songs I've felt this way about, but "In the End" by Linkin Park is definitely the example that comes to mind. As a young kid and in most of my teenage years, I never really liked Linkin Park; however, I liked Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and a lot of the acts whose sound kind of inspired the early 2000s scene that LP's best work hails from. It would only make logical sense for me to then appreciate what Linkin Park did for the genre, and after revisiting their catalog, songs that I used to dismiss as "edgy" simply hit different.
It's hard to parse whether these changes in taste signify a shift in my tastes, or rather just something I would have liked if I had given it an unbiased look earlier. Other people's tastes are changing too; NPR (1) found that while rap and hip-hop continue to be dominant in the US, genres like Latin and country are growing in popularity. Social media and the advent of Spotify are cited for this growth in multilingual music since the same metrics show that Afrobeats is also increasing dramatically in popularity. While streaming has some downsides for artists, it's also reduced the US-centric nature of popular music; record labels no longer need to play it 'safe' and 'marketable' by having English as the musical Lingua Franca and making music a cultural Rosetta Stone of sorts instead.
I can attest to being exposed to music in other languages; some of my favorite playlists feature City Pop, a subgenre of J-Pop from the late 70s and 80s that features heavy influence from Disco and R&B. "4:00 AM", "Plastic Love" and "Bay City" are songs I likely would not have been exposed to if not for this 'democratization' of music following the advent of streaming.
Only time will tell how far the globalization of music will grow; as artists from opposite sides of the world collaborate and share ideas, we may begin to see international pop (Or I-Pop, a term that I am taking credit for if it becomes popular) become a genre in its own right, and the way that we interact with music will, no matter what, continue to evolve.
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