Some kids/teens never really explored popular music because of various factors such as financial ones. Personally, I didn’t start getting “my own music” until after the beginning of my first semester in college at 17 as I couldn’t afford to buy the music to go along with a budget-line walkman I got as a Christmas gift a couple of years before until I earned enough from my part time job to set aside for that purpose. And the “gag gift” of Vanilla Ice’s “To The Extreme” CD doesn’t count because it was a gag gift a friend dumped on me because a clueless relative thought that Vanilla Ice was “in” and he felt the need to get rid of it ASAP*.
Even then, I had to rely on the kindness of dormmates to borrow their CD/tape decks so I can dub the CDs to type 1 cassettes so I can listen to them on that walkman.
- It did come in handy when a HS classmate needed to borrow it to retaliate against a dormmate who refused repeated requests to turn down his blasted cheesy hair metal at 3-4 am. Took only 2-3 times of blasting Vanilla Ice by HS friend prepping it on repeat right before heading off to his 8 am classes before the noisy dormmate who preferred sleeping in till noonish "surrendered".