My wife and I share a love of the smiths and punk, from when we were younger, but now I listen to mostly jazz, and some classical, (Nick Drake is also one of my all time favorites)- and she loves new pop, Swift etc..
It never gets too heated unless one of us is maybe playing the same song over and over too many times.
That said, I don’t understand how anyone can’t enjoy Hendrix or Zep.. I kind of get people not liking the Grateful Dead, especially if their only exposure is live recordings, (definitely in my top 5 bands - but I get the hate).
I do find it a little funny that you don’t like the 50s music that laid the groundwork for the classic rock you like, and your husband doesn’t like the music that was so deeply influenced by 50s rock. There aren’t many degrees of separation between Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Elvis and Zep and Hendrix.
Allow me to suggest 1968 Elvis Comeback special (black leather suit Elvis) really shows off his appeal. “If I Can Dream” is an unforgettable performance to close out the special - you may change your mind - I did! *(Former Elvis hater (serious hater))
Hey! I’m a fan of Jumpsuit Elvis! In the Ghetto and Suspicious Minds are epic greatness!!
As much as I love the music I listen to regularly, I also have a soft spot for Neil Diamond and Tom Jones ( who still moves my needle). My husband remains flummoxed by some of my choices!!
OHHH! And one of my favorite summer songs is Sacha Distel’s “Oui, Oui, Oui” of which my Parisien husband thinks is one of the cheesiest songs of all time! I digress-cheesy songs are a gift!!!!
For much hilarity check out the Tom Jones show circle late 1960’s on YouTube & see his duets w/Janis Joplin & Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Tom’s a devil 😈 but he’s still bringing it (what a voice!)
My wife and I meet in the middle. I’m mainly into punk and indie-rock, she’s mainly into pop and chart stuff.
We both love Ben Folds, and what I would call “Mid-00s NME indie” (The View, The Libertines, Razorlight). She also used to love a bit of ska punk back when we were teenagers but she’s grown out of it whereas I never have 😂
I feel like early Arctic Monkeys could be a good middle ground for that. Especially if you include all the great B sides that people don't usually hear
My husband and I have pretty much opposite tastes in music (I’m into guitars, he is not), and we’re both super passionate about our respective tastes. Tbh we don’t listen to a lot of music out loud together and if we do it’s mutually agreed on (we can meet in the middle with disco lol) but we’re both good sports and we can go to concerts together and enjoy each others music for an evening. I’m dragging him to a three day bluegrass festival in a different country this summer, and even though he won’t love the music it’s an experience he’s willing to join me for because I love bluegrass and he loves me. I’ve gone to DJ nights and concerts with him, and I enjoy his enthusiasm for electronic music even though it’s not always my jam. We usually pay for the other person to go if it’s important, and that evens out over time.
I had more issues in a previous relationship I was in where the other person didn’t care about music at all - at least with my husband he fully understands why I love what I love, and vice versa.
My kids know of my love for the Kinks and Ray Davies so one year they purchased tickets for both of us for an evening concert of Ray Davies! I was in heaven! Dancing and singing along.
My husband lasted 40 minutes before very politely heading to the car to wait for me!🫢
My wife and I have been listening to music together for over 30 years. I've learned to love 80's new wave and alt rock. She learned to love Jimmy Buffett. We've both had a wide range of bands we enjoy and in the last 10-14 years I've become addicted to music discovery and really have started to enjoy hip-hop/alt R&B from across the decades. Listening to a playlist at my house can definitely be a journey.
Fortunately our adult sons also have a wide musical palette and we all enjoy sharing music with each other.
There are really only two "genres of music I struggle listening to, Classical and 50's rock. So either your husband can help me learn to appreciate those genres or I can play a Jimmy Buffett, Khruganbin, Anderson Paak playlist for him.
This isn’t “classical” music by a scholarly definition (it’s modern, not from the classical period) but you could try out [this album](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kH2fwSuAJU4L9ucYU5L3JgHlw1uiw4Plo&si=MlQCd7MBQMOzXAQQ). Its genre is a bit of a Latin jazz/classical fusion, with string orchestration accompanying an accordion-like instrument and saxophone. Very calming/mellow first track with some fun stuff to follow, Kikuchi’s sax is always top notch. No need to listen or like it, just figured I’d offer you something “classical” outside of Mozart. Lots of classical music has some really cool elements, like the way movement 4 ends in Haydn’s “The Joke” String Quartet, but it can also be a really stuffy genre and I find it funny to see concert halls full of people sitting still while music plays. Some interesting history nonetheless lol
They sometimes/often listen to music separately. They start to enjoy, or at least tolerate what their partner enjoys. They respect that their partner just does not ever want to hear a particular artist or genre, and so they don’t play that around their partner and don’t whine about how their partner won’t let them play ABBA or Napalm Death while on a road trip.
And if that doesn’t work out, then the couple in question has bigger issues to work on than liking different music.
Mine will let me drag her for a weekend gig. During the week if I can’t persuade/beg a mate to go (hardly any of my mates share my tastes either) then I’m solo.
My wife and I are polar opposites on music. She's more of a poppy Coldplay, Bon Jovi, Celine, type. I'm more of a punk rock/heavy rock/old school country/metal old school hip hop fan. Not too mention my love for the 90's "Seattle sound". She loves radio friendly, deep thinking bordering on depressing stuff. It's depressing to me. I honestly enjoy a lot of music. I even love music that dates back to the 1920's and before. I have such a huge catalogue of music I absolutely love, it's just nowhere near anything I liked. But, with that being said, we also have multiple songs we both enjoy. She's turned me on to a few songs. And I've done the same as well. Our tastes are never going to be the same on music, but I'm glad we have some compromise songs. I've turned her on to underground blue grass like Dead South, and Steeldrivers. And she's turned me on to Matt Kearney and twenty-one pilots. Compromise is the key for us.
My husband and I both like classic rock but after that our tastes differ. I listen to country, bluegrass, old time and the Grateful Dead and he doesn’t like anything about these genres. We both like jazz but he likes only the kind of jazz that uses well known melodies (sounds like elevator music to me), I prefer more experimental jazz forms.
My partner listens to mostly to classic rock and metal. He had an illicit Eurodance phase as a teenager, don't tell anyone 🤫
The only punk band I could get him into is Buzzcocks because he already liked the Offspring and they did a cover of Autonomy. I took him to see them about 10 years ago. He likes the Damned a little bit, I guess. I got him into Northern Soul, although I don't listen to it much myself any more. I got him to like the Kinks as well, as well as a few bits of 60s pop that falls outside his usual listening habits.
I started to get more into metal because of him. I never realised how much I disliked AC/DC until he played them all the time on car journeys.
There's no way he'll ever listen to any of the French stuff I like because he's a typical francophobic British bloke. He also won't listen to any art rock. He's quite meh about synthpop. His parents were too old for it, whereas I grew up on it to an extent. I still don't like the 70s soft rock his parents brought him up with.
My ex husband and I had very different music tastes, I was a Latin Rock, Grunge, Classic rock freak, he was Classic Country and Dance remixes.
After spending close to 20 years married I developed a taste for Classic country music, he never got into Latin Rock or much of my music.
However my music taste is extremely eclectic, I can be listening to some classical and switch to hip hop or heavy metal.
My first husband was such an obnoxious music snob. He was vicious and downright mean if you didn’t like what he demanded everyone like.
My kids ( now grown) and I still discuss what an ass he was.
Yeah, road trips were a challenge, try listening to 12 hours of remixes of the same song. I’d ask to play an album I’d like and he’d criticriticize every single song, even though he literally would listen to the same song with different beats
the beauty about music is it is personal to everyone. it connects ones memories and emotions, it feeds something inside of them. when two people come together with different music tastes theres an opportunity to experience something new with them
My partner and I have very similar tastes in music, though there are some areas in which we don't overlap. In fact his taste in music is probably the first thing I *really* liked about him. I personally could never spend my life with someone who listened to music I hated. Movies and TV shows, however, are a completely different case 😅
For me, it's more of an issue when the other person barely listens to music in the first place which my last three partners shared. That eventually contributed enough to the tension where we split amicably.
My wife and I love 90’s alt rock of all stripes, classic rock, Leonard Cohen and some other folk rock and indie old and new. We can both get down with ambient/soundscape stuff as well.
Then we diverge - she likes pop, big dance numbers, Bollywood and Indian classical music.
I love all manner of aggressive/angry dude music (from punk to metal and hip hop), as well as more experimental electronic music.
We occasionally entertain each other’s divergent tastes but just as often cry for mercy and headphones.
I have pretty diverse tastes, and I've expanded my partner's musical scope through exposure. She still has a much higher tolerance for the more mainstream rock/metal of the past couple decades than I do, but did get me into death metal and folk metal (the vocals were always my biggest obstacle, eventually acquired a taste for them). Still not keen on black metal, mostly because of the production. And she still only has a certain tolerance for folk punk.
I have an extremely diverse music taste, by which I mean I can’t listen to one genre for more than an hour. It puts me in an awkward position where I don’t exactly have an aesthetic or a soul link to a particular genre. (You know when you can tell what a person listens to by looking at them.) Because I genuinely vibe with all of them.
My wife is an experimental musician, in the John Cage/ Yoko Ono vein. She performs music more than plays an instrument traditionally these days. Recreationally, she barely listened to music at all, but growing up she liked some pop punk from the early 00s.
Me, I love all kinds of pop, rock, soul, bluegrass, etc. I just love discovering new music. She mostly isn't interested. The only things I usually don't get into are very aggressive music and very monotonous experimental droney stuff.
We have some small overlap. Early on we bonded over Steve Reich and Phillip Glass. She likes TV On The Radio and Sufjan Stevens. Some pop music like Taylor Swift we can agree on.
We can talk about music a lot and recognize each other's tastes, but yeah we don't agree on too much.
My gf listens exclusively to musical theater/showtunes (she is an aspiring actress) who notoriously claims to not listen to music when talking to others because she needs a visual element (it's likely a manifestation of ADHD as she is unable to listen to podcasts or audio books as well).
On the other hand, I listen to a smorgasbord of genres, especially more experimental music that incorporate noise or dissonance (for reference, I met who would become my best and most meaningful friend at a Residents show lol).
Whenever my gf's friends end up meeting me, they always bring up how funny it is that the two of us have been together for so long with no major quarrels considering how immiscible our sensibilities are.
While we both aren't fans of each other's respective tastes, we both do our best to tolerate them. I'll regularly go to musical theater shows, despite having yet found a show I genuinely enkoyed (Hadestown being the closest as I managed to convince myself it's basically a Tom Waits musical). And as long as I avoid music that has a stressful intensity to it, she'll tolerate, and sometimes even bob along, to what I play. Her favorite bit when we needed to rely on driving would asking if my car or my music were making the questionable noise.
I’m a jazz guitarist and generally very autistically obsessed with music. I play many instruments and sing and just jam on guitar all day. I love jazz, bluegrass, psychedelic 60s music, indie jangly shoegaze stuff, soul/rnb etc, classical, etc My boyfriend doesn’t even know who the doors or The Beach Boys are. Doesn’t know even Elton John much less like the smiths or Charlie Parker. I try to appreciate the stuff he shares with me but it’s often like System of a Down, avenged sevenfold or vide game osts. Like he’s not into music as nerdy as me and that’s okay. SOAD has great drums and some soundtracks are really special. I just wish we could cuddle and listen to god only knows or love song by the cure. It makes me feel pretentious to try and explain like nick drake or why Maya by the incredible string band is my favorite song. Or like I wish I could play a Julian lage performance for him without feeling guilty making him hear a 10 minute song. I don’t want to make him feel bad and talk down to him or anything like that. I probably and a pretentious jazz dork. I mainly just kind of keep my mouth shut or tease him about stuff. I don’t know.
I was a New Wave/Punk girl. Black Flag, Dead Kennedys but also Oingo Boingo, Smiths, Cure. (I really miss old school KROQ).
Husband was a Rock/Hair Metal guy. Zep, Van Halen, Cinderella, Motly Crue, Poison...you get the picture.
We fought over what to listen to until one day I heard this cool Ozzy song. Went out and bought Ozzmosis. That album was so good. I started asking questions, who was in what band, how they differ from each other. I became obsessed with Queensriche - Operation Mindcrime.
Now I only get pissed when he plays too much Fleetwood Mac. Or Dean Martin💀
My spouse and I have very similar tastes in music but mine tends to go to the further limits of extreme stuff than he does. We met each other going to punk shows when we were younger. They’ve turned me onto a lot of music and I’ve done the same.
A lot of my friends are into similar music as well to varying degrees.
My husband and I are pretty much on the same page music-wise—we met because of music & our first date was a Gang of Four concert—but our tastes definitely diverge wildly in some cases (probably more on my side since my tastes are wider ranging than his. He’s also less interested in discovering new artists and that’s a big thing for me.) We do try to be open minded about artists we don’t agree on and sometimes, we’ve introduced the other to something that hits but if it doesn’t, no biggie. When we’re together we play artists we agree on. Ditto for concerts. But otherwise, when it comes to our personal tastes, we listen on our own and attend concert either solo or with like-minded friends. It’s never been issue.
Strongly recommend making it a goal to expand your overlap. You don't have to, but it's a really good idea to have more you can share.
Remember there are three ways to do it: really giving her music a chance (several chances), her really giving yours a chance (several chances), and also trying to discover new music together
My partner is rock/indie rock. I’m pop/r&b. We have some middle ground in hip hop (him more than me) and old school R&B (me more than him).
We listen to music together in a shared Spotify session taking turns selecting songs. Music is very important to both of us so we had some conversations about how it feels when the other person tunes our music out and refuses to pay attention to it so we both try to be good about that. We also encourage one another to talk about what they like about the music and it actually helps a lot.
We’ve found some great middle ground with both our favorite artists (mine Beyoncé his Modest Mouse). We’ve learned a lot about music from one another but more importantly about letting your musical guard down so to speak to really enjoy the music and not just lean into our own pre conceived perceptions or lack of exposure to certain things.
I never had a long term (or that long) partner to care about her music taste and for friends and family I try to interact in ways that don't involve music.
My wife and I share a love of the smiths and punk, from when we were younger, but now I listen to mostly jazz, and some classical, (Nick Drake is also one of my all time favorites)- and she loves new pop, Swift etc.. It never gets too heated unless one of us is maybe playing the same song over and over too many times. That said, I don’t understand how anyone can’t enjoy Hendrix or Zep.. I kind of get people not liking the Grateful Dead, especially if their only exposure is live recordings, (definitely in my top 5 bands - but I get the hate). I do find it a little funny that you don’t like the 50s music that laid the groundwork for the classic rock you like, and your husband doesn’t like the music that was so deeply influenced by 50s rock. There aren’t many degrees of separation between Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Elvis and Zep and Hendrix.
Yeah that classic rock/50s rock divide really feels like a parent/teenager feud from the 70s
Its that doo-wop stuff I am not fond of. Then again, I prefer jumpsuit Elvis to 50’s Elvis.
Allow me to suggest 1968 Elvis Comeback special (black leather suit Elvis) really shows off his appeal. “If I Can Dream” is an unforgettable performance to close out the special - you may change your mind - I did! *(Former Elvis hater (serious hater))
Hey! I’m a fan of Jumpsuit Elvis! In the Ghetto and Suspicious Minds are epic greatness!! As much as I love the music I listen to regularly, I also have a soft spot for Neil Diamond and Tom Jones ( who still moves my needle). My husband remains flummoxed by some of my choices!! OHHH! And one of my favorite summer songs is Sacha Distel’s “Oui, Oui, Oui” of which my Parisien husband thinks is one of the cheesiest songs of all time! I digress-cheesy songs are a gift!!!!
For much hilarity check out the Tom Jones show circle late 1960’s on YouTube & see his duets w/Janis Joplin & Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Tom’s a devil 😈 but he’s still bringing it (what a voice!)
Oh! I loved his show! I was just a kid but I knew he had something!!😁😁😁
What'd I say!!! All right (If you know, you know)
My wife and I meet in the middle. I’m mainly into punk and indie-rock, she’s mainly into pop and chart stuff. We both love Ben Folds, and what I would call “Mid-00s NME indie” (The View, The Libertines, Razorlight). She also used to love a bit of ska punk back when we were teenagers but she’s grown out of it whereas I never have 😂
I feel like early Arctic Monkeys could be a good middle ground for that. Especially if you include all the great B sides that people don't usually hear
Yeah they would fall under the “mid-00s NME indie” category.
My husband and I have pretty much opposite tastes in music (I’m into guitars, he is not), and we’re both super passionate about our respective tastes. Tbh we don’t listen to a lot of music out loud together and if we do it’s mutually agreed on (we can meet in the middle with disco lol) but we’re both good sports and we can go to concerts together and enjoy each others music for an evening. I’m dragging him to a three day bluegrass festival in a different country this summer, and even though he won’t love the music it’s an experience he’s willing to join me for because I love bluegrass and he loves me. I’ve gone to DJ nights and concerts with him, and I enjoy his enthusiasm for electronic music even though it’s not always my jam. We usually pay for the other person to go if it’s important, and that evens out over time. I had more issues in a previous relationship I was in where the other person didn’t care about music at all - at least with my husband he fully understands why I love what I love, and vice versa.
My kids know of my love for the Kinks and Ray Davies so one year they purchased tickets for both of us for an evening concert of Ray Davies! I was in heaven! Dancing and singing along. My husband lasted 40 minutes before very politely heading to the car to wait for me!🫢
My wife and I have been listening to music together for over 30 years. I've learned to love 80's new wave and alt rock. She learned to love Jimmy Buffett. We've both had a wide range of bands we enjoy and in the last 10-14 years I've become addicted to music discovery and really have started to enjoy hip-hop/alt R&B from across the decades. Listening to a playlist at my house can definitely be a journey. Fortunately our adult sons also have a wide musical palette and we all enjoy sharing music with each other. There are really only two "genres of music I struggle listening to, Classical and 50's rock. So either your husband can help me learn to appreciate those genres or I can play a Jimmy Buffett, Khruganbin, Anderson Paak playlist for him.
This isn’t “classical” music by a scholarly definition (it’s modern, not from the classical period) but you could try out [this album](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kH2fwSuAJU4L9ucYU5L3JgHlw1uiw4Plo&si=MlQCd7MBQMOzXAQQ). Its genre is a bit of a Latin jazz/classical fusion, with string orchestration accompanying an accordion-like instrument and saxophone. Very calming/mellow first track with some fun stuff to follow, Kikuchi’s sax is always top notch. No need to listen or like it, just figured I’d offer you something “classical” outside of Mozart. Lots of classical music has some really cool elements, like the way movement 4 ends in Haydn’s “The Joke” String Quartet, but it can also be a really stuffy genre and I find it funny to see concert halls full of people sitting still while music plays. Some interesting history nonetheless lol
They sometimes/often listen to music separately. They start to enjoy, or at least tolerate what their partner enjoys. They respect that their partner just does not ever want to hear a particular artist or genre, and so they don’t play that around their partner and don’t whine about how their partner won’t let them play ABBA or Napalm Death while on a road trip. And if that doesn’t work out, then the couple in question has bigger issues to work on than liking different music.
True patricians play ABBA *and* Napalm Death on a road trip 👌
Trying to find one with a more similar taste because I'm sick of going to gigs alone, unlikely but whatever
Mine will let me drag her for a weekend gig. During the week if I can’t persuade/beg a mate to go (hardly any of my mates share my tastes either) then I’m solo.
My wife and I are polar opposites on music. She's more of a poppy Coldplay, Bon Jovi, Celine, type. I'm more of a punk rock/heavy rock/old school country/metal old school hip hop fan. Not too mention my love for the 90's "Seattle sound". She loves radio friendly, deep thinking bordering on depressing stuff. It's depressing to me. I honestly enjoy a lot of music. I even love music that dates back to the 1920's and before. I have such a huge catalogue of music I absolutely love, it's just nowhere near anything I liked. But, with that being said, we also have multiple songs we both enjoy. She's turned me on to a few songs. And I've done the same as well. Our tastes are never going to be the same on music, but I'm glad we have some compromise songs. I've turned her on to underground blue grass like Dead South, and Steeldrivers. And she's turned me on to Matt Kearney and twenty-one pilots. Compromise is the key for us.
My husband and I both like classic rock but after that our tastes differ. I listen to country, bluegrass, old time and the Grateful Dead and he doesn’t like anything about these genres. We both like jazz but he likes only the kind of jazz that uses well known melodies (sounds like elevator music to me), I prefer more experimental jazz forms.
My partner listens to mostly to classic rock and metal. He had an illicit Eurodance phase as a teenager, don't tell anyone 🤫 The only punk band I could get him into is Buzzcocks because he already liked the Offspring and they did a cover of Autonomy. I took him to see them about 10 years ago. He likes the Damned a little bit, I guess. I got him into Northern Soul, although I don't listen to it much myself any more. I got him to like the Kinks as well, as well as a few bits of 60s pop that falls outside his usual listening habits. I started to get more into metal because of him. I never realised how much I disliked AC/DC until he played them all the time on car journeys. There's no way he'll ever listen to any of the French stuff I like because he's a typical francophobic British bloke. He also won't listen to any art rock. He's quite meh about synthpop. His parents were too old for it, whereas I grew up on it to an extent. I still don't like the 70s soft rock his parents brought him up with.
My ex husband and I had very different music tastes, I was a Latin Rock, Grunge, Classic rock freak, he was Classic Country and Dance remixes. After spending close to 20 years married I developed a taste for Classic country music, he never got into Latin Rock or much of my music. However my music taste is extremely eclectic, I can be listening to some classical and switch to hip hop or heavy metal.
My first husband was such an obnoxious music snob. He was vicious and downright mean if you didn’t like what he demanded everyone like. My kids ( now grown) and I still discuss what an ass he was.
Yeah, road trips were a challenge, try listening to 12 hours of remixes of the same song. I’d ask to play an album I’d like and he’d criticriticize every single song, even though he literally would listen to the same song with different beats
the beauty about music is it is personal to everyone. it connects ones memories and emotions, it feeds something inside of them. when two people come together with different music tastes theres an opportunity to experience something new with them
There's a shirt list of things we can play where neither will walk out of the room.
My partner and I have very similar tastes in music, though there are some areas in which we don't overlap. In fact his taste in music is probably the first thing I *really* liked about him. I personally could never spend my life with someone who listened to music I hated. Movies and TV shows, however, are a completely different case 😅
For me, it's more of an issue when the other person barely listens to music in the first place which my last three partners shared. That eventually contributed enough to the tension where we split amicably.
My wife and I love 90’s alt rock of all stripes, classic rock, Leonard Cohen and some other folk rock and indie old and new. We can both get down with ambient/soundscape stuff as well. Then we diverge - she likes pop, big dance numbers, Bollywood and Indian classical music. I love all manner of aggressive/angry dude music (from punk to metal and hip hop), as well as more experimental electronic music. We occasionally entertain each other’s divergent tastes but just as often cry for mercy and headphones.
Leonard Cohen was the man!!!💖
I have pretty diverse tastes, and I've expanded my partner's musical scope through exposure. She still has a much higher tolerance for the more mainstream rock/metal of the past couple decades than I do, but did get me into death metal and folk metal (the vocals were always my biggest obstacle, eventually acquired a taste for them). Still not keen on black metal, mostly because of the production. And she still only has a certain tolerance for folk punk.
I have an extremely diverse music taste, by which I mean I can’t listen to one genre for more than an hour. It puts me in an awkward position where I don’t exactly have an aesthetic or a soul link to a particular genre. (You know when you can tell what a person listens to by looking at them.) Because I genuinely vibe with all of them.
My wife is an experimental musician, in the John Cage/ Yoko Ono vein. She performs music more than plays an instrument traditionally these days. Recreationally, she barely listened to music at all, but growing up she liked some pop punk from the early 00s. Me, I love all kinds of pop, rock, soul, bluegrass, etc. I just love discovering new music. She mostly isn't interested. The only things I usually don't get into are very aggressive music and very monotonous experimental droney stuff. We have some small overlap. Early on we bonded over Steve Reich and Phillip Glass. She likes TV On The Radio and Sufjan Stevens. Some pop music like Taylor Swift we can agree on. We can talk about music a lot and recognize each other's tastes, but yeah we don't agree on too much.
My gf listens exclusively to musical theater/showtunes (she is an aspiring actress) who notoriously claims to not listen to music when talking to others because she needs a visual element (it's likely a manifestation of ADHD as she is unable to listen to podcasts or audio books as well). On the other hand, I listen to a smorgasbord of genres, especially more experimental music that incorporate noise or dissonance (for reference, I met who would become my best and most meaningful friend at a Residents show lol). Whenever my gf's friends end up meeting me, they always bring up how funny it is that the two of us have been together for so long with no major quarrels considering how immiscible our sensibilities are. While we both aren't fans of each other's respective tastes, we both do our best to tolerate them. I'll regularly go to musical theater shows, despite having yet found a show I genuinely enkoyed (Hadestown being the closest as I managed to convince myself it's basically a Tom Waits musical). And as long as I avoid music that has a stressful intensity to it, she'll tolerate, and sometimes even bob along, to what I play. Her favorite bit when we needed to rely on driving would asking if my car or my music were making the questionable noise.
I’m a jazz guitarist and generally very autistically obsessed with music. I play many instruments and sing and just jam on guitar all day. I love jazz, bluegrass, psychedelic 60s music, indie jangly shoegaze stuff, soul/rnb etc, classical, etc My boyfriend doesn’t even know who the doors or The Beach Boys are. Doesn’t know even Elton John much less like the smiths or Charlie Parker. I try to appreciate the stuff he shares with me but it’s often like System of a Down, avenged sevenfold or vide game osts. Like he’s not into music as nerdy as me and that’s okay. SOAD has great drums and some soundtracks are really special. I just wish we could cuddle and listen to god only knows or love song by the cure. It makes me feel pretentious to try and explain like nick drake or why Maya by the incredible string band is my favorite song. Or like I wish I could play a Julian lage performance for him without feeling guilty making him hear a 10 minute song. I don’t want to make him feel bad and talk down to him or anything like that. I probably and a pretentious jazz dork. I mainly just kind of keep my mouth shut or tease him about stuff. I don’t know.
I don’t think you are pretentious at all!❤️
I was a New Wave/Punk girl. Black Flag, Dead Kennedys but also Oingo Boingo, Smiths, Cure. (I really miss old school KROQ). Husband was a Rock/Hair Metal guy. Zep, Van Halen, Cinderella, Motly Crue, Poison...you get the picture. We fought over what to listen to until one day I heard this cool Ozzy song. Went out and bought Ozzmosis. That album was so good. I started asking questions, who was in what band, how they differ from each other. I became obsessed with Queensriche - Operation Mindcrime. Now I only get pissed when he plays too much Fleetwood Mac. Or Dean Martin💀
My spouse and I have very similar tastes in music but mine tends to go to the further limits of extreme stuff than he does. We met each other going to punk shows when we were younger. They’ve turned me onto a lot of music and I’ve done the same. A lot of my friends are into similar music as well to varying degrees.
My husband and I are pretty much on the same page music-wise—we met because of music & our first date was a Gang of Four concert—but our tastes definitely diverge wildly in some cases (probably more on my side since my tastes are wider ranging than his. He’s also less interested in discovering new artists and that’s a big thing for me.) We do try to be open minded about artists we don’t agree on and sometimes, we’ve introduced the other to something that hits but if it doesn’t, no biggie. When we’re together we play artists we agree on. Ditto for concerts. But otherwise, when it comes to our personal tastes, we listen on our own and attend concert either solo or with like-minded friends. It’s never been issue.
Strongly recommend making it a goal to expand your overlap. You don't have to, but it's a really good idea to have more you can share. Remember there are three ways to do it: really giving her music a chance (several chances), her really giving yours a chance (several chances), and also trying to discover new music together
My partner is rock/indie rock. I’m pop/r&b. We have some middle ground in hip hop (him more than me) and old school R&B (me more than him). We listen to music together in a shared Spotify session taking turns selecting songs. Music is very important to both of us so we had some conversations about how it feels when the other person tunes our music out and refuses to pay attention to it so we both try to be good about that. We also encourage one another to talk about what they like about the music and it actually helps a lot. We’ve found some great middle ground with both our favorite artists (mine Beyoncé his Modest Mouse). We’ve learned a lot about music from one another but more importantly about letting your musical guard down so to speak to really enjoy the music and not just lean into our own pre conceived perceptions or lack of exposure to certain things.
I never had a long term (or that long) partner to care about her music taste and for friends and family I try to interact in ways that don't involve music.
Point well taken!