[Naught]

I did not listen to anything aside from video game music or movie soundtracks until I was 12. At that point I started listening to Weird Al and Eiffel 65. Drastic improvement, eh? In seventh grade my friends and I decided to listen to whatever the kiddies thought was "cool," which just so happened to be comprised of Eminem, Limp Bizkit, and various mainstream rap. I ditched all that in eighth grade for the stereotypical angry white boy music selection. My favorite bands at the time were Linkin Park, System of a Down, AFI, and Disturbed, and I also enjoyed Alien Ant Farm and Gorillaz. It was at that point that I started discovering electronic music, though, with the help of the internet. Middle school ended there. Thank heavens.

The transition to high school kept middle school's status quo. Over the course of my freshman year, however, I started moving away from the aforementioned bands and got more and more into electronic music, predominantly trance. By the later portion of that year, trance was pretty much all I listened to. This kept up halfway through my sophomore year, when (again, with the help of the internet) I discovered various European metal bands that perked my interest. By the end of my sophomore year I was listening to electronic, metal, and nothing much else. During junior year I decided to try my hand at classical and found that I loved it, so that joined my listening ranks.

Finally, during my senior year of high school, I decided to become much more open-minded and went scouring through genres upon genres of music, from the obscure to the well-known, clogging my hard drive with hundreds of bands. The difference was that I made a note not to torrent my music, and I still don't get any satisfaction from simply grabbing an archived discography and having loads of albums left unlistened to. I take care in getting music on an individual song or album basis, and my playlist is constantly in careful rotation whenever I'm not in the mood for something in particular, to ensure that I'm completely familiar with everything I have.

My music library has since expanded to the point where nowadays, when somebody asks me what kind of music I like, I just simply respond, "I don't listen to music." Seriously. It's easier than trying to explain.