This week saw the release of a new survey entitled Then is Now: A Study on Modern Nostalgia. The research was commissioned by Vevo—which apparently still exists—and examines the ways in which Generation X, Millennials and Gen Z experience cultural nostalgia. Its release was announced on Vevo’s site alongside the news that “Vevo [is launching] nostalgia-based buying capability”—the two pieces of news, I’m sure, being entirely unrelated. Anyway, the survey—which is available in full via this Google Drive link—is interesting despite itself. The framing is, let’s say, not academically rigorous: claims like the one that “digitally native consumers yearn for collective, shared experiences that existed before content was available immediately on demand” demand pretty robust support, and I’m not sure that the report itself—a survey of 1,800 people that deals largely with how streams of old songs tend to increase after they’re featured in films or TV shows—really provides such support. (If anything, I’d argue that a whole bunch of kids discovering Sade’s “No Ordinary Love” after it was featured in Love Story actually constitutes a collective, shared experience.”) There are also some obvious methodological flaws: the claim that “Nostalgia is now borrowed, not remembered” is based on asking respondents whether they “have … ever felt nostalgic for content, styles, or cultural moments from before you were born or were too young to remember?” It seems pretty obvious that the older you are, the less likely you are to answer “yes” to this, for the simple reason that you have more of your own life to remember. There’s no indication that the survey controlled for this.