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@moonshinebrigade I think the point about access is a valid one.

I'm obviously describing a situation of privileged youth access to music here, and its atypicality might throw the problem described in the article into sharp relief - or maybe it's not at atypical as all that, beyond specific hardware choices.

I built Small Owlbear (age ~8) a computer at six, and since then they've had supervised, informed, and appropriately limited access to the internet.

They use it to pursue their music taste - their other main avenue for consuming music is CDs and requesting digital albums for me to put on in the car.
They have bands they like - artists we've seen at festivals or that they've found through memes, or by asking me, or by going through playlists on YouTube.

They also enjoy playing audio games, such as Audiosurf 2 and Ragnarock, and I've loaded up the games with tracks they've asked for, and they've discovered others there.

While I definitely provide a solid pillar of their musical taste at this point, they've discovered and enjoy a lot of music that would never have occurred to me. (Imagine Dragons, for a start, as well as Fall Out Boy, Metallica, 2Cellos and Noisestorm.)

But I'm not sure that everything musical that they access would be counted.

They're really into DIY YouTube music channels - musicians who play and score arrangements of multiple modern standards on piano or trumpet, for example.

A lot of those same artists perform and film their performances at train station pianos, and we were lucky to catch one for an hour or so when we last travelled.

However I suspect that Small Owlbear's peers might be getting a very similar experience from TikTok, which I know their parents give them access to via their phones.