It’s still quite opaque to me how kids today get to hear about stuff – despite asking my students all the time; nagging them even. ‘Friends’ they say, or ‘blogs’ but what blogs? It’s amazing, in a tutorial group of eight before Xmas, I asked them to name three records they’d liked last year and there was no overlap at all – and some of them are quite close friends…..or at least as close as 1st years who met in September can be.
Other odd things – while they will all ritually hate ‘pop’, there’s no real animosity towards each other’s musics – metal fans don’t hate hip-hop, house people don’t hate indie – they just ignore, I’ve tried to get them arguing about music but it doesn’t work. They’re annoyingly tolerant. Half the fun in our music press mediated youth was hating stuff.
One final thing: I got the same group to work out what they’d spent on music in the year gone by and they all came in at under £100, and a few at near zero – but more than half had spent up to twice that on branded headphones…….