Jeebers… such a shiver I just had running down my spine, reading this thread, as, except for Metallica, I’ve never even heard of a single one of these artists/groups.
Honestly felt like I had stepped into the Twilight Zone there for a minute, a kind of meta IF game, if you will 
Yeah, I think the Mountain Goats have pretty broad appeal age-wise — I’m primarily into indie bands who were big in the early aughts (I’m 41, so go figure I like the music of my early 20s) , and back when I was still able to go to shows (pre COVID and pre parenthood!) there were definitely way more younger people as compared to when I would go see the Hold Steady or folks like that. But there’s also an interview with their frontman in the latest New Yorker which of course has a slightly older target demographic!
Anyway they’re easily my favorite band, and other folks in a similarity indie vein I’ve tended to listen to a lot are the aforementioned Hold Steady, Ted Leo, Sharon Van Etten, EMA, Iron and Wine… oh yeah, and Arcade Fire (I actually went to high school with their frontman; I gave him a small Easter Egg-y cameo in my last game, Sting).
I don’t get as much chance to listen to them these days, though, since they’re all very lyrically driven and my work day is like 90% meetings and writing, and outside of work I’m usually hanging out with my seven month old son. So I wind up listening to more post-rock type bands, largely Rachel’s/Rachel Grimes and Explosions in the Sky.
(Basically I had very cool taste in music for like three months in 2004 and it’s all been downhill ever since).
This is, objectively, the correct opinion. 
If anyone has played my last ifcomp game, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Lorde is probably my current favorite musician. But recently, I’ve been listening to Homestuck fan songs from the early 2010s. This, uh, also shouldn’t be a surprise. I know it’s seen as cringe nowadays but the sheer amount of creativity and effort that was put into this fandom is really beautiful, and might never be replicated again.
Uhm. Your son has pretty strong opinions about music, apparently. What does he do, hold his breath until you play his music?
I once heard it argued that people like music that was new when they first had sex [blush]. Not true in my case! I inherited my older brother’s taste for progressive rock. (No, I haven’t asked.) He’s now into J-pop 
I agree with Pete Gardner: I find it hard to concentrate on ‘linguistic’ things if I can hear singing or talking in English. Fortunately, my lack of skill in other natural languages means I can listen to foreign-language song 
It would be an interesting experiment to see if singing affected my Inform 6 programming as badly as my Inform 7 programming!
What do I listen to? Well, Tangerine Dream did my favourite instrumental music.
My record deck has started vibrating up and down, which puts it at great risk of ‘skating’ 
Needs mending/replacing. (I’ve got about 300 LPs, mostly bought in the '70s.) Can’t afford it… though I have spent about £35 on computer bits this week… Hmm.
(I’ve only heard of 1 or 2 bands mentioned in this thread!)
I do think that Mike Russo(?) and P.B Parjeter(?) have mentioned The Mountain Goats on the forums before though… I might be mixing up names on the forums though, but I’m pretty sure they’re older than me/closer to your age (Mike’s mentioned he’s ‘technically middle aged’ in a recent review, so he’s probably around my dad’s age, and roughly double mine) and have heard of one of the bands, so it’s probably not an age thing and more of a taste thing, haha!
I’m 30, probably a bit on the younger side of these forums. I started listening to the Mountain Goats in high school circa 2008, mainly the albums released between 2003 and 2012.
I don’t listen to those albums all the way through anymore but still go back to a few favorite songs, particularly “Autoclave,” “Beautiful Gas Mask,” “Moon Over Goldsboro” and “Night Light.”
The albums themselves still hold up but I find it emotionally difficult to listen to music that I haven’t listened to for years.
Other than that I’ve been listening to Mike Oldfield quite a bit recently. I also enjoy (or have enjoyed) Wye Oak, Mike Oldfied, The Cranberries, David Bowie, the New Pornographers, The Divine Comedy, Regina Spektor, Sambassadeur, Lucky Soul, and assorted 80s songs.
Side point about Eurovision: I’d heard about it but never got into it. A few years after I did, I finally got around to watching Father Ted, and I was shocked to find the parts I found funniest weren’t the ones people liked, and vice versa.
(My favorite bit is when the lights go on and Father Ted is horrified to see all of Father Dick Byrne’s band! I also laugh at how Dick Byrne can’t possibly mean a word of his song as he is, of course, as much a humbug as Ted. As I understand, most people prefer watching Ted and Dougal go down in flames, but My Lovely Horse wasn’t the big laugh for me. Also, I want someone to bring Sha Na Na Na Na Na Na by the Death Pigs into existence.)
As for the original subject, when I was growing up, lots of parents were pretty sure that nearly everything had a Hidden Satanic Message in it. My parents even mentioned Louie Louie as a possibility. And stuff like Holy Diver from Dio was, of course, out, because Subversive Messages and Don’t You Dare Play That Backwards.
So I still really enjoy songs I never got to listen to, or songs with a different meaning than I thought or songs that were much more moral than I suspected.
One I was really surprised to know the real meaning of was Huey Lewis’s “Walkin’ on a Thin Line.” I’d heard it when I was very young, and without the Internet you couldn’t replay it, so I just remembered the beat and something like “Rockin’ on the Big Time.” When I finally bought the cassette, I said “Oh! THAT song!” But it was … different. But it’s neat to find how our expectations are subverted.
It maybe hasn’t unintentionally fooled as many people as Bruce Springteen’s Born in the USA, but it’s close. And it was originally panned for being too serious and IIRC was the lowest-charting of all the songs on HLN’s Sports album.
So I enjoy finding that sort of song. And it happens a lot when I have YouTube sort through “my mix” and go down the list, and maybe I find a song with a melody or chorus that I forgot.
Though other times I just listen to the same song over and over again until I’m almost sick of it.
Haiduk - Morph [melodic black metal]
I feel I listen more to the German/French electronic versions of this genre, but there are a lot of songs I hear from black metal that have been piquing my interest.
Lost Coastlines has an official soundtrack and i’m still listening to it to give good vibes
Hi! I’m a 20-something-year-old person! Allow me to explain why you all probably feel like this! 
The Internet has fundamentally and permanently changed how music distribution works, and now record labels are basically obsolete. As a result, if someone has the ability to make music, and has an account on SoundCloud or BandCamp, then they have the ability to get their music to the Internet for FREE. This means that anyone with a connection has the chance to find them and reliably have access to their music.
With the introduction of TikTok, powerful algorithms are now able to precisely introduce millions of listeners to millions of would-be-unknown artists with a really high success rate.
Trust me, kids my age don’t know any of these bands either! You could ask me or any of my friends to ask 25 strangers in our age bracket what they listen to, and you might not hear the same answer twice! There’s such an incredible variety and accessibility to music now, and the trend of worldwide-famous artists is only still a thing because powerful corporations are familiar with that model, and want to continue perpetuating it. If it weren’t for the cash cow that is the corporate “pop star”, I feel like everyone my age might each have very unique band/artist lists.
Some of my friends might have one or two bands in common with me, just because we share music with each other, but honestly each of my friends might listen to over 50 bands and artists, and the rest of us don’t know who any of them are.
It’s not so much that the younger generations have an entirely new roster of popular artists (though this is also true to an extent), as much as it is the music industry being completely flipped on its head in the last 15 years…!
Like, VNV Nation has a large enough following that they can go on tour, and they’re a fairly large name in the goth-electronic scene, but if you sample total strangers for what they listen to, you might need to poll 500 people before a single person lists that band by name.
I’ve mostly been listening to Gojira, VNV Nation, the Algorithm, Ghost and Pals, ALT BLK ERA, Kent Osbourne, Heilung, Eisbrecher, Rammstein, Ludovico Technique, and Wardruna.
I like music where electronic stuff tries to sound like metal. You get a lot of interesting things that way. 
This is simultaneously awesome and sad to me. Music was a common language with your age-mates when I was a kid, which was great in some ways. It helped you find your people. It gave you immediate bonds. It said something instantly recognizable about your worldview. It was also bad in some ways, because all those positive things had obvious negative implications, too. Also it was tightly controlled and there weren’t a lot of options unless you had money and access to a good record store.
And I’m listening to Nadine Shah tonight. Freaking brilliant.
This all seems basically right to me, from my remote vantage point as a forty-something, though I think it’s illuminating to also think of how the waning-away of the major labels and radio has had a greater and greater impact as time has gone on. Like, I can attest that this sentence:
…was 100% true 20 years ago, too – in those days when dinosaurs ruled the earth, I played a reasonable amount of attention to music and rolled pretty deep in my chosen subgenre, but until I dated someone who was into the goth/industrial scene I had no idea who they were. But they were regularly selling out mid-sized venues in LA all the same! In the late 90s/early aughts, the tools were still fairly primitive – Napster, mailing lists, newsgroups – and sometimes relied on serendipity – like, I still remember the time a friend of mine came into my dorm raving about this awesome trip-hoppy-with-rap song he’d heard on the radio, but he’d had to turn the car off before they said what it was, and then a couple days later another friend stayed up late watching MTV2 (I’m not old enough to really remember when MTV played music videos, but I am old enough to remember when MTV2 did. Apparently now it’s all Black sitcoms?) and told us about this cool cartoon video that came on at 3 AM, and we put two and two together and that’s how we discovered Gorrilaz.
But point being the Internet was already helping folks discover what would have heretofore been incredibly niche acts and form communities around them. The main difference between then and now, to my mind, is that at that point everyone could still name like a hundred different mainstream, major-label bands, because top 40 radio was still an omnipresent thing, people still watched TV and saw ads, or went to record stores and saw ads/end caps… with those marketing channels weakened, the influx of new big acts that everybody had to know started to choke off, and with folks continuing to find the music that spoke to them the most via increasingly sophisticated channels like the ones you mentioned above, eventually somewhere I think we hit a tipping point that’s brought us to the current (objectively much better) Babel.
(The one exception, of course, is the ur-populist genre of hip hop – as a very lame 41 year old, I could still rattle off like a dozen major hip hop artists, even if I couldn’t name or hum a song. Someone with more knowledge of that scene could probably explain what’s different there, since I’m underconfident that I fully get the story).
Oh, we still have something kinda like this, largely thanks to search engines. There’s that whole stereotype that people my age will identify with a hundred labels or something, but that’s because if you put one of them into a search engine, it reliably brings you to communities that have something in common with you. This is especially helpful when finding support groups, too, and does wonderful things for mental health.
Like, if I list off “genderfluid demi gray-ace autistic hard sci-fi metalhead prosopagnosiac”, I might get laughed out of the room and called an “attack helicopter” in certain company, and some may say I’m “conforming” or “constraining myself to labels and boxes” too much.
But the thing is: I don’t actually organize my behavior according to those labels. I’m not obligated to stay within a box. People grow, and gather/drop labels all the time. They aren’t laws or uniforms; they’re tags, and I can put any one of them into a search engine and suddenly it doesn’t feel like I’m surrounded by complete strangers in online spaces. This is also great if I’m either not accepted in any irl communities or happen to live somewhere where I genuinely do not have anything in common with people around me, other than maybe a favorite color.
Like, one amazing thing about humankind is how much variety and spectacular diversity we all have, but to have a statistically-significant chance of having any overlap with someone else, you might need the help of technology sometimes.
I have heard so many memories of people who are ace or autistic or have prosopagnosia, but didn’t know that any those were even a thing. They cried when they finally found a word for it, typed it into Google, and realized that they weren’t broken, and that they were just living a different and valid facet of the larger human experience.
Sorry, this got off-topic, but just wanted you to know this still happens, just not so much with music anymore.
I’ve appreciated that Autumn Chen makes playlists for her games and am thinking of doing the same thing. Does anyone else make playlists/“unofficial soundtracks” to accompany their games?