All you need is love — but you won’t find it on music apps

Y be surprised to hear that both Google and Spotify are offering new refinements to their products that promise to increase a user’s chances of finding a compatible life partner on the basis of shared musical tastes.

You can no doubt imagine how this would work. Find somebody whose favourite songs includes an appreciable number of your favourites and the chances are good that you might and a new tune to like. I’ve done that myself, many times.

What I haven’t done is use the coincidence of our liking a few of the same tunes as a springboard for asking another user of the service out for a drink with a view to proposing marriage.

Of all the fatuous notions seeking to account for what makes for compatibility in the matter of life partnerships, a shared taste in music is surely the most fatuous.

THERE ARE MANY reasons for this. If I may be permitted a sweeping generalisation based on nothing more than over half-a-century’s hard-won experience, one of them is that 50 per cent of the declared musical preferences of the male of the species are pure self-advertisement – and the worst thing you can do is take them seriously.

I spent decades working in offices where music played and soon learnt that whereas women will say, “I like this one – what is it?”, men will not go public on whether they like something until they have first established what it is and thought long and hard about whether it’s the kind of thing their self-image would permit them to be seen liking.

The one saving grace of this latest move in the campaign to drain every last dreg of romance from the great ceremonies of life, brought to you by the same people who invented swiping right, is that once it has been put into action no first date will be forced to resort to that ever- awkward conversational gambit, “What kind of music do you like?”

We all know that there’s only one proper answer to that question. It’s the Beatles!