Is Social Media Like Music?

Will we always long for the artifacts of our youth?

Some time ago I came across someone someplace (I don’t remember who, where, or when) who said something to the effect of, “If you ask someone about their favorite music they will most likely tell you about the music they were listening to when they were 16-years-old.”

In fact, I even found an article from Music & Science, a peer-reviewed journal that studies the intersection of music and—you guessed it—science, that suggest this is the case.

I think this is fascinating because it’s true for me…at least to some degree. I was listening to a bunch of pop punk/emo music in high school, and while I’m not sure I would say it is my absolute favorite genre of music today, it’s certainly one of my most-played genres on my Spotify Wrapped every December.

Since I began my professional career working in internet and social media back in 2013 I have wondered: Will we use the same social media platforms as we age, or will we change social media platforms as we enter and exit stages of life?

Social media isn’t going away, obviously, but new platforms come and go all the time. When I was in middle school, social media was just beginning to take off in a real way, and millennials were usually using some combination of MySpace and AOL Instant Messenger to connect with friends online.

Then, once Facebook opened up to everyone in September 2006, the beginning of my sophomore year of high school, most of my classmates left MySpace in the dust and totally migrated over to Facebook. I remember using both platforms actively for a year or two, but I eventually dropped MySpace, too.

Facebook was the dominant social media platform for millennials to connect with their peers until Instagram came onto the scene in October 2010, and then millennials found themselves using both platforms. Not even a year later, Snapchat was released, and millennials began to engage with more social media platforms than they could feasibly handle—and we haven’t even addressed YouTube.

So, to perhaps over-generalize, the millennial social media journey has looked like this:

MySpace/AIM → Facebook → Instagram → Snapchat¹

However, as indicated above, the only platforms that millennials ever really left behind were MySpace/AIM. Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat are all still popular among millennials, and newcomer TikTok is obviously at play, too.

What about Gen Zers (henceforth called Zoomers)?

Zoomers—born between 1997 and 2012—have a bit of a different timeline. Here’s what Zoomers’ social media lifecycle looks like:

Instagram → Snapchat

Zoomers aren’t old enough to have really left any social media platforms behind yet, and none of the major ones they have used in their lives have fallen off entirely.

As you can see in this table here from a 2024 Pew study, millennials and zoomers have particular affinity for their “native” social media platforms—Facebook and Instagram respectively (if you consider 18-29 to be roughly zoomers and 30-49 to be roughly millennials):

Here’s the question I have at the heart of all of this: as millennials and zoomers age well into their 50s, 60s, and beyond, will they continue to prefer their native social media platforms, or will they jump to different platforms as they age?

As millennials and zoomers continue to age up, assuming their native social media platforms continue to exist, will they prefer them? So far, millennials and zoomers are sticking around their native platforms and using them at higher rates than any others that come along.

For instance, Facebook is beginning to have a reputation as the social media “nursing home,” if you will, where millennials and boomers hang out, and zoomers try to avoid.

But when will Instagram become the social media nursing home? Will Instagram be a cringe platform made for “old people” for my daughters when they get to high school in 10-12 years, or will Instagram still be a place for young(ish) people to build their primary presence on social media?

We seem to cling to the social media platforms we used as we set out on the social media landscape for the first time. Of course social media is still so new that we have very little longitudinal data to make any substantive claims in this regard, but even as popular as Snapchat and TikTok and other platforms are, millennials and zoomers aren’t using them at higher rates than their old, familiar haunts.

Is social media like music? Will we always long for the warm comfort of artifacts of our youth?

It seems that way, so long as they’re still available for streaming and socialization.

1. We aren’t going to look at social media platforms that haven’t stuck around for any significant period of time (Tumblr, Vine, etc.) or platforms that are for more niche/entertainment uses (Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube). I primarily want to look at the core platforms that people use to connect with other individuals, especially those they know. Sort of their “home” on the social internet.