This preference for the past comes in sharp contrast to more recent decades.

Least memorable of all, the study shows, were songs from the 2000-to-2015 period.

“The 1960s to 1990s was a special time in music, reflected by a steady recognition of pieces of that era-even by today’s millennials,” lead author Dr Pascal Wallisch writes.

“Spotify was launched in 2008,” they continue, “well after nearly 90% of the songs we studied were released, which indicates millennials are aware of the music that, in general, preceded their lives and are nonetheless choosing to listen to it.”

The study was conducted by taking a randomly selected number of Billboard singles to form the last 76 years (two top songs were randomly taken from each year) and presenting them to the study’s millennial participants.

Each was then asked to indicate how familiar they were with each of the 152 hits presented.

A number of these were songs from Beatles tunes Let It Be‘s ‘The Long And Winding Road‘, The Magical Mystery Tour‘s ‘Hello Goodbye‘, Help!‘s ‘Help!‘, A Hard Days Night‘s ‘Eight Days A Week‘, The Beatles’ ‘Love Me Do‘ and Billy Preston‘s cover of ‘Get Back’ all cropping up.

“Our large sample of mostly millennial participants seemed to remember at least some of the hit songs from the 1940s and 1950s,” reads the study’s closing lines. “Thus, we conclude that collective memory for popular music is different from that of other historical phenomena.”

You can read ‘Who Remembers The Beatles?’ in its entirety here