"How did you get into Metal?"

 

 "How did you get into metal?" a young woman at the most recent metal concert I went to asked me this question.... It has been stuck in my head ever since.

How does anyone "get into" the sound that they like? I keep thinking about this question. How are we introduced to different genres of music? Was it Radio? Television? Movies? Friends and Family? Do we just stumble into it one day? That seems to be the consensuses( as I've asked everyone I know how they got into the different genres they listen to). We simply hear it playing somewhere and so many of us don't remember the first place we hear it. What was the first song that got you to want to look for more?

The first few times I heard Poison or Guns & Roses on the radio I just liked them. I really didn't care what genre they were. I didn't need to think about that stuff until years later when I  started buying albums for myself and needed to locate them in a store. How did I get into Nine inch Nails? MTV the Radio I liked what I heard and I went out to buy the album.  

However, I'm not sure that things are quite the same anymore. I'm not sure that the younger generations, the Z's and the Alphas even listen to radio. They listen to playlists and those are really just the sounds they are already listening to. They don't watch the late night shows or Saturday Night Live to see the bands. All the videos being suggested to them are based on the algorithms. It's all more of what the program knows you already like.

So maybe this is a very valid question. How did you find this genre? Maybe this kind of discovery,  in this day and age,  is something much more important than I'm giving it credit for. I would like to think that some of these discoveries are being made by friends and family sharing their love for different sounds and different bands, and that people are really connecting through the music. That would be nice. After all, isn't the point of music, to bring people together?