One word: Discovery. College radio is excellent for this. My favorite DJ has been on 4 hours a week for a decade, and most of the music is new to me. Half is O

One word: Discovery. College radio is excellent for this. My favorite DJ has been on 4 hours a week for a decade, and most of the music is new to me. Half is OK in the background, there can be a handful of awful grindy noise bleh, but another bunch of it is often great, and there are amazing gems that have taken my listening off into new frontiers — from Bevis Frond to Gravitar to Mono to Expo 70. The most common question the kids ask is: How can you listen to that? The answer is: I’m happy to listen to unfamiliar and even unpleasant music if that’s the price to discover something completely unexpected and amazing.