Autobiographical memories are disproportionately recalled for events in late adolescence and early adulthood, a phenomenon called the reminiscence bump. Previous studies on music have found autobiographical memories and life-long preferences for music from this period. In the present study, we probed young adults' personal memories associated with top hits over 5-and-a-half decades, as well as the context of their memories and their recognition of, preference for, quality judgments of, and emotional reactions to that music. All these measures showed the typical increase for music released during the two decades of their lives. Unexpectedly, we found that the same measures peaked for the music of participants' parents' generation. This finding points to the impact of music in childhood and suggests that these results reflect the prevalence of music in the home environment. An earlier peak occurred for 1960s music, which may be explained by its quality or by its transmission through two generations. We refer to this pattern of musical cultural transmission over generations as cascading reminiscence bumps.

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We explore the use of personalized radio to facilitate the discovery of music created by local artists. We describe a system called MegsRadio.fm that produces a customizable stream of music by both local and wellknown (non-local) artists based on seed artists, tags, venues and/or location. We hypothesize that the more popular artists provide context for introducing new music by more obscure local artists. We also suggest that both the easy-to-use and serendipitous nature of the radio model are advantageous when designing a system to help individuals discover new music. Finally, we describe an interactive map that features personalized event recommendations based on the user's listening history. Results from a small-scale user study indicate that users are more aware of the local music scene after using it, discover relevant local music events, and would recommend the experience to others.