When I was but a wee lad, I, of course, listened to whatever my mum and dad (but mostly my mum) put on the radio in the car. I distinctly remember a lot of 90's pop and R 'n B... Pop groups like S Club 7 and Steps, boybands like Westlife and Boyzone, girl groups like Atomic Kitten, and single artists from Britney Spears to Natalie Imbruglia ("Torn" is actually still a favourite) were popular at the time, along with my Mum's personal love for ABBA, The Bee Gee's, Kylie Minogue and Madonna. As a result, the first physical music CD I ever owned was Blue's debut album "All Rise"...
My Dad, on the other hand, liked classic rock bands and older, ballady type stuff. When he was driving us (without my mum present to take control of the music), he'd put on AC/DC, Guns and Roses, Led Zeppelin, and Creedance Clearwater Revival, and, another band who were more modern and big at the time: Nickelback. To me, this was all different and exciting, so physical music CD number 4 (after Blue album number 2 and a Westlife album) was Nickelback's "Silver Side Up" (special edition with live performance DVD!).
I just naturally gravitated towards the more rocky stuff after that - it was louder and cooler and the instruments were awesome. I would watch out for rock band performances on Top Of The Pops, which is what led me to my next CD: "Dead Letters" by The Rasmus. In primary school I made friends with someone who loved the exact same two albums and we listened on repeat! At age 11 my Dad took me to my first gig, which was Nickelback touring "The Long Road" at Brixton Academy. I found it so loud that my ears rang for days, but I loved it! That was the year that Green Day's "American Idiot" released, and I listened to nothing but on my CD walkman all summer.
A couple of years later in 2006, my brother entered an early emo phase following an infatuation with Busted and McFly... As a birthday present, I had asked for The Killers' "Hot Fuss", which had been making the rounds for a year or so already. My brother got "Welcome To The Black Parade" by My Chemical Romance. I don't think I'd ever been truly captured by darker sounding songs before, but it slowly sunk some hooks into me. I was also listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers by then, as well as some of those older classic rock acts I mentioned earlier. Although I had previously played Tony Hawk's Pro Skater on the playstation, it wasn't until I played the second game on the Gamecube that I started picking up on the soundtracks. Even then, at the time I only got into a couple of Jimmy Eat World and Less Than Jake songs, rounding out my taste to Rock, Radio-Alt-Rock, and Pop-Punk, of which I found a few more bands through TV and Kerrang Magazine.
A year or so later, everyone's emo phase was in full swing and I got recommended my first Screamo songs: A Static Lullaby's cover of "Let Go (by Frou Frou)", and "Hand of Blood" by Bullet For My Valentine. These were the new different and exciting, although I only remember getting into Avenged Sevenfold as a result... Then Guitar Hero 3 came out. It exposed me to a wide range of rock and metal music, including everyone's first Power Metal song - "Through The Fire and Flames" by Dragonforce - but I didn't actually take a whole lot from it at the time (other than discovering Slash's other band Velvet Revolver...).
It was around 2009 when everything just started happening all at once for heavy music and I. A slew of exciting new alt-rock bands were promoted really heavily by Kerrang; I had had a couple of years of pressing all the links on every post-hardcore bands' wikipedia pages to find all the bands everyone toured with or played for previously or as a side project; I babysat for someone with Sky TV so found Scuzz TV's heavy metal music video countdowns and discovered bands like Slipknot; I remembered bands like Bad Religion and Papa Roach from the Tony Hawk games sountracks; Killswitch Engage and Disturbed from Guitar Hero 3; and I played NHL09 on the PS3, which had perhaps my favourite soundtrack ever, properly acquainting me with Billy Talent, Coheed and Cambria, and Protest The Hero. A new wave of metalcore was also just exploding in popularity towards the end of the year and throughout 2010 due to Asking Alexandria's "Stand Up and Scream" and Attack Attack!'s "Stick Stickly".
From there it was just several more years of clicking wikipedia links for Metalcore Bands, until suggested videos on YouTube got better and I could discover new bands and songs that way. Music reviews in magazines, then online and then on Youtube were how I kept track of new releases, until Spotify and Apple Music became a thing and I could easily sample and discover by myself. My music taste was generally quite stagnant up until 2014 though. I was listening to nothing but post-hardcore and metalcore, but then Protest Hero and Coheed and Cambria tipped me into progressive and technical metal by re-introducing me to TesseracT and Periphery.
After that I made a conscious effort to expand my music taste a bit. I started listening to older rock again, as well as old school R 'n B (Chaka Khan and Whitney Houston) and a bit of those solo alt pop artists (Kate Bush, Tracey Chapman, Natalie Imbruglia, Vanessa Carlton). I also got into other genres through rock and metal fusions - funk rock and jazz, and this even got into smooth/lounge jazz. Blind Guardian got me into Folky music. Strangely enough, getting into Scandinavian Folk brought me full circle and got me into Atmospheric/Folk Black Metal, which in turn led me to some of the most brutal music I've ever gotten into. currently I am interested in getting into instrumental sountracks from TV, Movies, Anime and Games, to have some background music available for when I write and work.
Oddly, despite being an avid manga and anime fan throughout my teens and early 20s, I never really got into Anime OP's beside the odd one-off song here and there ("Unravel" and "The World" come to mind). There are several Japanese artists I like (Dir En Grey, early Crossfaith, Crystal Lake, Coldrain, Ningen Isu, Sigh, MONO etc.), but they don't sound very "anime". A key factor is that I really struggle with very cheesy lyrics, especially random exclamations in english... Other genres that I just can't really get into by themselves (with very rare exceptions) include K-Pop, J-Pop, Rap and Hip-Hop, Radio Pop, Pop Rock - not for lack of exposure or trying.