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By Katherine Sayre

It was yacht rock that sank Amanda Rodriguez.

Rodriguez, a 38-year-old millennial in Los Angeles, thought her musical tastes were fresh enough to keep pace with her Gen Z — or nearly Gen Z — friends.

This week, she learned she's actually 66, at least according to Spotify. The streaming platform launched a "listening age" feature as part of its Spotify Wrapped that compiles each user's top artists and songs for the year.

The age estimator sent some Spotify listeners into a tizzy over being declared decades older and, by some interpretations, perhaps not-so-cool.

Rodriguez, who works in real-estate marketing, thought back to the smooth sounds of Steely Dan, the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac from the 1970s and 1980s that had been in heavy rotation for her this year.

Having younger people in her life, she said, might have "made me delusional and think that I have somewhat of a skewed-younger mindset."

Spotify's "listening age" has set group chats abuzz, with people sharing their results with friends and colleagues, touching a nerve with music fans, not unlike how health nuts talk about their " biological age."

The convenience and accessibility of music on streaming has allowed listeners to dive deep on older tunes. That has helped to boost the value of established musicians' song and recording catalogs, resulting in big sales for rockers like Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan and sellout tours for decades-old bands.

Just as young people today binge older TV shows like "Friends," they don't mind listening to their parents' and grandparents' music.

If you're a septua-, octo- or nonagenarian by Spotify's accounting, you may find yourself in hip company. Pop star Grimes, 37, posted on X that she was the ripe age of 92, even though her top two songs were from pop star Addison Rae.

An X user posted that their father was 19, while they got 78, adding "how the turntables."

Colette McIntyre, Spotify's creative director who works on Spotify Wrapped, said the age gaps reflect how streaming has opened up music genres and the tunes of decades past to a wider audience. Young people now don't make an identity based on their fandom like when she was in high school. She was all emo, antipop. Now, she's 35 with a listening age of 47.

"The internet inherently democratizes listening, and you're so much more exposed and you no longer are defined or limited to what you know you are hearing on the radio, or what is popular and peaking at the time," she said.

One Spotify employee got the age of 100 thanks to listening to classical music and Gregorian chants, she said.

Spotify says the age calculation is based on a psychological phenomenon known as a "reminiscence bump." As people get older, they tend to have stronger memories from their younger years — and a tendency to listen to the music from their more youthful eras, Spotify says.

Here's roughly how Spotify makes the calculation: It takes the release dates of all songs the individual user played in 2025 and determines what five-year span of music the user listened to more than others their age. Spotify will then "playfully hypothesize" someone's listening age, according to its website.

When reporting the results in the app, a caption serves as a disclaimer: "Age is just a number. So don't take this personally."

Riss Neilson, an author in Cranston, R.I., is 37. But by Spotify's accounting, she's a whopping 80.

She has a passion for classics like "Unchained Melody" by the Righteous Brothers and songs by Etta James and Aretha Franklin — though her top five artists overall included Taylor Swift, Sza and Kendrick Lamar.

"I think that just means I have an old soul, and I like everything," Neilson said.

Everything including Maroon 5, she said. Maybe that explains it.

Write to Katherine Sayre at katherine.sayre@wsj.com