Ever think of how different your music taste could've been?

[Spyglass]

As a child, I ended up with tons of 60's-80's radio as a kid and how that ended up shaping my opinions of modern music. I was annoyed with a lot of 90's and early 2000's music before I tried out some albums from the 2003 Rolling Stone Top 500. But I sometimes think that I likely would have never have gone to that list if I listened to my friends in school who didn't like "old people" music. If I had listened to the music my friends liked, how long would it have taken me to check out the Rolling Stone list? How long would it have taken me to get away from the "I only like modern music" mentality, and would I have ended up here? I can only say I'm glad I had 60's pop growing up.

I may not be alone thinking these things. A person's history with music is full of precious memories, and for things to have gone a different way could have meant that we may never have had memories like that.
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Do it yourself and let me play my music: https://www.besteveralbums.com/thechart.php?c=61802

[mickilennial]

not really

[Applerill]

“You eventually end up becoming yourself.”
-Problematic writer dude I wish I didn’t love

[indieshins]

[BARDAMU]

[CA Dreamin]

[NewsFromHome]

Yeahhhh kinda with most others here. I grew up fairly isolated (middle of the mountains - 45 minutes from your nearest grocery store type beat) and school was online. My parents didn't really have much love for music though my mom did get me into trip hop. So me getting into music was more of a self guided thing at least until I got to college.

[guzguzgarbit]

[EyeKanFly]

People need to keep in mind that the country/region someone grew up in and the language someone grew up speaking DEFINITELY impacted their taste in music. I was born in the US and only speak English. If I was born 200ish miles south I probably would've been listening to mostly Spanish-language music.

But I think more people here are thinking along the lines of "how did your parents' taste in music affect yours" and I gotta say that my Mom loved Rod Stewart and I can't stand him lol. Maybe I would like him if it wasn't all I heard on car rides growing up
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51 Washington, D.C. albums!

[Skinny]

A person's taste in popular media is inherently and irrevocably intertwined with and dependent upon their unique life experiences. Without getting too "butterfly effect" here, any change in a person's life, particularly during their formative years, would likely have a significant effect on the music that they enjoy. What a person's parents or friends did or didn't listen to will have an impact - be that positive or negative - on what said person listens to. All of us here would have a different taste in music if events in our respective lives had panned out differently.

My dad loved punk and post-punk, reggae, soul and R'n'B, post-bop, and certain strands of the classic rock canon, but he also hated house and techno, hip-hop and grime, and metal. I take my love of Sade and Curtis Mayfield and Bob Dylan and Gregory Isaacs from the experiences I had listening to those artists growing up, but my dad also liked Oasis and The Jam and Joan Baez and Thin Lizzy, artists I have varying levels of respect or admiration for, but not artists I particularly care to listen to. My mom's taste in music was more limited, but I remember that car journeys with her involved Meat Loaf, Air Supply, and Andrew Lloyd Webber soundtracks, all things I can't stand, frankly. It doesn't mean that I don't look back on those car journeys fondly, but I'd have picked a very different soundtrack. The friends I made in school were into all sorts of things, but primarily contemporaneous indie rock, hip-hop and grime, and a little later dubstep and UK garage. At university, my housemate was super into doom and stoner rock. My fiancée enjoys country pop and turn-of-the-millennium R'n'B. One of best friends listens almost solely to New Order, Dave Berman, and Pavement. Another listens exclusively to reggae. My mate who I was out with last night is the only person I know who cares for Boosie or UGK or Kodak Black, despite both our misgivings, and so we often show one another our new rap discoveries. All of these people have affected my tastes, and (without sounding too arrogant) I would like to think my tastes have influenced theirs, for better or worse. But if my parents had never moved house when I was 11, or had picked one of the houses we looked at in a different neighbourhood, I likely would never have met these friends, and my tastes would have been impacted accordingly. I may not even be as passionate about music at all. If I hadn't taken that first pill at that UK garage rave when I was 15 or 16, I may never have developed the appreciation I have for electronic music. If I'd have missed the bus the day I sat next to another future friend and listened to Bad Brains on his CD Walkman, I wouldn't have gone home and researched American punk rock, which took me in all sorts of cool directions at a time in life when what I found was able to have a profound effect. If I hadn't visited Valhalla Records (now defunct) in Kilmarnock, on a whim because I was bored of my gran dragging me around charity shops, and subsequently picked up Wowee Zowee and It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back at an age where they were both electrifying to me, and then listened to them both on repeat whilst I sat and logged hours and hours on Need for Speed: Underground 2, who knows when I would've found them and if they'd have even mattered to me by then. If any of these events - some major and some minor - had turned out different, then of course my taste in music could and likely would be unrecognisable from what it is now. Nothing exists in a vacuum.
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2021 in full effect. Come drop me some recs. Y'all know what I like.