Thanks Sol.

Changing the music list as the age demographic changes is exactly what I was hoping for in those performances. It's mathematical, really. If an audience member at a performance is in her/his 80's then the music s/he remembers most, and which refer to significant life-memories will probably be when s/he was in the teens or 20's or mid-life, so that would be up to about 60 years ago, so that takes us to around the 1960's, give or take a decade or so.

For me, my music listening was always there on the radio, and on an old secondhand radiogram with 78 rpm records and some vinyl records - and I love swing era music even now - but it was only when I was given a small transistor radio in my teens and we also bought a TV that I could start to hear the music of my choice.

The first vinyl record I ever bought was a Donovan album and my sister bought another of his albums on the same day. I also remember the first time I heard the Blind Faith album at a late-high school party. I was entranced. My first encounter with seeing someone playing the harp was Harpo Marx in a Marx Brothers movie. The first time I heard Tim Buckley and I thought he was whining and weird but his music later grew on me was in my first shared student house. In fact I discovered a lot of different music styles in shared houses that I would possibly have never learned to love - or hate in the case of a couple of folk-style performers I will refrain from naming. :-D

Here is a recent article on Oz ABC News related to this topic, although it focuses mainly on classical music:

Why musical memories from childhood are so strong

"Have you ever wondered why it's easier to remember music you heard decades ago compared to what you had for breakfast last week?

"'Music is remarkably resistant to forgetting,' says Steffen Herff, Leader of the Sydney Music, Mind, and Body Lab at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

"These musical memories often invoke details including what you saw and how you felt even decades after the event."

...