Music is widely recognized as a pleasurable activity, largely due to its power to evoke emotions1. Appreciating music and perceiving its emotional content require the auditory system to process complex acoustic signals accurately2,3, which becomes challenging with hearing loss. Aging is a leading cause of hearing loss and is also associated with reduced ability to recognize musical emotions4. However, it remains unclear whether this decline is primarily driven by age-related hearing loss or by neural changes associated with aging, and whether musical experience can mitigate these effects. This study aims to investigate the effect of musical experience on the ability to identify emotions in music, and to disentangle the respective contributions of aging and presbycusis to the decline of this ability.Eighty-five adults aged 60 to 90 years completed an audiometric assessment and were categorized into two groups based on their musical background: Musicians (n=38) and Non-musicians (n=47). Exclusion criteria included the presence of cognitive impairment, anxiety or depressive disorders, visual impairment, and severe osteoarthritis. Participants then performed a validated task5 assessing their ability to identify emotions conveyed in musical excerpts. They were asked to evaluate 56 musical excerpts, each designed to convey one of four target emotions (joy, sadness, peacefulness, fear). For each excerpt, they rated the extent to which it expressed each emotion on a 0-to-9 Likert scale. The percentage of accurate responses, defined as the highest rating score for a melody corresponding to the intended emotion, was calculated for each participant for each emotion.A multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) revealed a significant main effect of musical expertise on performance, F(4, 76) = 4.895, p < .001, η² = .126, with Musicians demonstrating significantly higher scores [M = 80.38] than Non-musicians [M=75.25]. Age was negatively associated with performance, F(4, 76) = 13.295, p < .001, η² = .206, indicating a decline in emotion identification with increasing age while hearing loss was not significantly associated with performance, F(4, 76) = 0.662, p = .620. Finally, no significant interaction effect was observed.These findings suggest that musical experience is associated with better emotion identification in music, independently of age and hearing loss. Performance declined with age, but not with the degree of hearing loss, suggesting that this decline is more closely related to aging than to hearing sensitivity. However, the absence of an interaction effect indicates that this advantage does not reflect a protective effect against age-related decline.