Well the greatest song in the world was famously performed by Jack Black and Kyle Gass, and they can’t remember how it went

In fact, the odds are you will never hear the song you’d like best.

What about the past 250,000 years of lost music?

I’m an uber driver. I had a passenger and we got to discussing what kind of music she likes. She said “Little Wing” so I told Siri to play some “Little Wing”. Of course Siri knew what I was asking for and played some Lil Wayne.

Passenger said she liked Lil Wayne because he’s got different moods. “Sometimes I just wanna chill, you know? Like it ain’t gotta be all go-go-go all the time you know?”

So I asked her if she’d heard any BB King before. She said “Who’s that?” So I told Siri to play The Thrill is Gone by BB King.

She was like “Ooooooh! This is chill as fuck thank you!”

I had just learned about BB King the previous day from another passenger, when I had the Grateful Dead playing some blues. The passenger from the day before was an old hippie, and she was telling me about seeing BB King and Led Zeppelin at a place called The Psychedelic Supermarket in Salem, MA back in the 70s.

I also showed this younger passenger Since I’ve Been Loving You by Led Zeppelin. She was so stoked to have some new music to get her friends to chill to, since they all into that go-go-go music all the time.

I love being someone in a position to introduce people to new music. I love my job.

I’ve already heard All Star by Smash Mouth.

The pedant in me has to point our that if it’s the “best song we’ve ever heard…” then we already heard it, and it isn’t still “out there” as in unheard and waiting to be listened to.

Might not even be in your language

Nope. I’m pretty sure everyone has heard that chumbawumba song.

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There’s a good chance that you’d a have a new favorite song every day if you could listen to all of them. We’re constantly changing and they would probably speak to us differently on different days.

Reminds me of a saying, “that some of the best days of our lives haven’t happened yet”.

There’s sort of an observer effect at play too though.

The more you hear it, the less interesting it is to you. The song doesn’t change, but your perception does, and you develop an acquired taste in music that way.

Sorry I disagree. Barbie girl - Aqua has already been written, and most people know it.

It might not even be written yet.

I don’t know why, but it just seems so weird that you can go back 30 years and no one would have any awareness of a lot of songs that everyone knows today. They were only up to like Mambo Number 2 or Hey I’ll Think About It! Nickelback didn’t yet exist but if they did, they’d be singing to look at this thing they are doing right now, maybe take a photograph.

Go back 100 years and no one has any awareness of entire genres of music loved by billions today. It was almost an entirely different culture with popular hits like classical music, Take Me Out To The Ballgame, or You Are My Sunshine and other songs that are considered children’s music today.

The best songs we’ve ever heard are the ones we listened to as teenagers. You’ll never get a dopamine rush like that again.

https://slate.com/technology/2014/08/musical-nostalgia-the-psychology-and-neuroscience-for-song-preference-and-the-reminiscence-bump.html

Brain imaging studies show that our favorite songs stimulate the brain’s pleasure circuit, which releases an influx of dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and other neurochemicals that make us feel good. The more we like a song, the more we get treated to neurochemical bliss, flooding our brains with some of the same neurotransmitters that cocaine chases after.

Music lights these sparks of neural activity in everybody. But in young people, the spark turns into a fireworks show. Between the ages of 12 and 22, our brains undergo rapid neurological development—and the music we love during that decade seems to get wired into our lobes for good.