I think this wandering point is important. In another time, friends, rock magazines, and even album cover art were the gateways to new music.
Now it’s links and sites, the endless surf. A great thing for the individual listener–but maybe the end of the old pre-viral ways of building community through music.

Still, I love when I can look at a listener’s scrobbles on last.fm, and this
person half my age in Brazil is listening to this or that, and look, there’s a full track to hear, and hey, this is pretty good.