I broke popular culture. Not on my own. I had help. An entire generation of us, born in the 60s and early 70s, saw popular culture as a thing we owned. Earlier teenagers just drank the Beatles’ magic potion. We swam in it. While our forebears might have seen themselves as the Elvis generation, or the Rolling Stones people, we assimilated everything that came along with a voracious quest for new content.

So when I read research coming out of Spotify that midlifers are listening to Taylor Swift and One Direction I don’t see it as a symptom of any kind of crisis. I just think “yeah, typical us.” We co-opted the Beatles, we embraced prog, we more-or-less invented punk, then new wave, new romantic, and myriad other micro-scenes that followed afterwards. (Remember new mod? Romo? No, I don’t want to either.) A lot of the prime movers in acid house were a good deal older than anyone in a youth cult should have been, too.

Even now, in my 50s, while a previous generation might have put away childish things such as pop music and become a regular at a garden centre or bowls club, I’m still listening to Lauren Laverne’s 6Music show every Monday and building a shopping list from her selection of the week’s new releases.

Popular culture has become a buffet at which midlifers are browsing as happily as their children are

But, betraying my age a little, I still tend to consume music by the album – rather than how younger listeners might, by the song, which is another factor that might be skewing the results of Spotify’s study. While I’m happy to downloads scads of hip easy listening from Sohn, Little Dragon and Polica, I’d probably only want to hear the new Rihanna interlude once. So I’ll stream that, along with old Benny Hill novelty numbers and NWOBHM oddities and anything else that might catch my passing fancy. It’s hard to see how an angry young generation of teens might be able to rebel against that kind of ingrained eclecticism. Maybe today’s teenagers are more gown up than we were, and realise that there’s no pressing need to be a musical rebel.

The circulations of the inky music press have declined sharply since I read all those titles religiously in the 70s. The NME’s lofty pronouncements of what was or wasn’t “credible” have no real equivalent today. It’s almost immaterial whether you came up through one of Simon Cowell’s variety shows or the Brit school, or fought your way up through the clubs like an old stager. All that counts is your record. And you’re only as big as your last one.

Now that music is effectively invisible, rather than carried around in big 12” square record sleeves, it doesn’t have such a pivotal role in the teenage identity. With passing fancies propagated through Tumblr or Instagram or Snapchat, it’s all a lot more fluid. Streaming services such as Spotify have played a part in this too. Rather than having four or five albums that we loved so much that they represented our entire identity, we’ve all got an infinite number of records and we quite like a few of them. .

Popular culture has become a buffet at which midlifers are browsing as happily as their children are. We pile our cultural plate high with whatever catches our fancy. The model of pop music just belonging to the young is over. Because my lot broke it.