Getting older, I’ve decided, is a process of everything changing so slowly that you never really notice at the time, until five years of sneaky, incremental change eventually adds up to one moment of consequence which suddenly hits you when you find yourself doing something that you never, ever, would have done once upon a time, and the horrible truth of it all sends you into a spiral of self-loathing that only a weekend’s worth of solid drinking will cure.

What the hell am I talking about? Well, I think I just realised that I now know absolutely nothing about music. The fact is, I haven’t acquired any new music for what must be at least two years now, and when I have, it’s been songs that I’ve heard while playing a video game.

Now just to clarify: I’m not talking about actual game music, like the Orange Box soundtrack, or some arty re-interpretation of the Super Mario Brothers theme music, I’m talking about real-life rock, rap, metal and dance, licensed for use in games made by big-name publishers to impress idiots.

So the other day, I found myself downloading a song that I first heard while playing Need for Speed: Underground and it hit me that I’d already got a handful of other songs from the game, as well as noting the significant number among my recent acquisitions that were featured in the Guitar Hero series.

There are two ways you could react to such a realisation, and so far I’ve been vacillating between the following two thought processes:

1) “It’s not so bad. Songs featured in Guitar Hero are chosen because they have fairly broad commercial appeal, and if you like rock music but hadn’t heard those songs before, you were always going to like them. The same goes for Need for Speed: Underground – okay, so the music’s aimed at 15 year-old boys, but that’s roughly your mental age anyway. And if you spend the number of hours required to become reasonably proficient at either game, you’ll hear the featured songs often enough to find yourself humming them on the way to work and want to own one or two of them. It’s no big deal.”

2) “This is a new low. What’s next – buying a song because you heard it on the fucking Homebase advert? You’re one step away from downloading Dancing in the Moonlight by Toploader, and when that happens, it’ll be the last thing you do before you kill yourself.”

Only one of these can be right, and I’m coming to realise which one it is. And you know what, dear reader? I’m not sure I like the answer.