> It certainly felt that way and it was talked about... but people I knew always listened to a variety of music. Before about 2000 I think you'd find most peop

> It certainly felt that way and it was talked about... but people I knew always listened to a variety of music. Before about 2000 I think you'd find most people, not all but most, tended to listen to smaller varieties of music. Top40/Pop radio stations played a very safe middle ground of music. There was never anything too avant-garde or experimental. The 70s and 80s saw a lot of radio stations cropping up targeting particular genres rather than just one late night DJ that loved that genre. This included "oldies" stations catering to previous decades' Top40 back catalogs. Big record stores were very clearly organized by genre which was copied by the big box stores when they started carrying significant music sections. It wasn't until finding single tracks online was easy that I think many people branched out with musical styles. Someone hearing a single on the radio of a genre they didn't normally listen to were unlikely to go drop $15 (in 199x dollars) on a whole CD of that artist. Relatively few artists actually released CD singles (in the US) so that $15 entry fee to a new genre wasn't trivial. Fast forward to the early 00s in the era of P2P and iTunes (the clear industry juggernaut) and singles were now readily available. If you wanted that one rap or dance track you could easily get it without dropping $15 on a whole album. YouTube and then streaming just made this sort of thing even easier and cheaper. Someone spending $10 a month on music in 1993 had access to far fewer choices than someone spending the same amount today.