Juvenile songbirds express species-specific song discrimination from an early age, which focuses learning onto the songs of their parental species. However, it remains unknown whether this early song discrimination is influenced by early social experience or maternal effects or whether it is instead largely genetically determined. We manipulated early social experience by swapping young embryos between the nests of two co-occurring songbird species-pied and collared flycatchers. We show that nestlings are more active in response to playbacks of conspecific songs, even when raised by adults from the other species, thus enabling us to reject social experience as the main determinant of early song discrimination. We then crossed the two species in captivity and showed that the song responses of hybrid nestlings do not depend on social experience or maternal species, implying genetic divergence of early song discrimination. Our results provide conclusive evidence that early song discrimination has a largely genetic component, which can stabilize reproductive isolation by reducing song learning across closely related species.