I'm 22 now and my taste is still changing all the time, but now feels like a good time for some reflection. Typing on my phone so bear with me please.
I didn't really get into music as a whole until I was about 14. Before that I had limited exposure to lots of music so my taste was limited to stuff I heard in video games, movies, and my mom's CD collection. We had 56k internet until 2008 so it was painstaking to research music.
I started off listening to mostly 80s rock: Motley Crue, Guns N Roses, White Snake, Aerosmith, Def Leppard, and more; all the big names I guess. I made a friend near the end of my freshman year of high school who got me into Avenged Sevenfold and Nirvana. That summer my dad gave me a CD collection of Nirvana's demo and unreleased stuff which I devoured.
Over the next year I got into heavier stuff, bands like All Shall Perish, Suffokate, Norma Jean and Born of Osiris. I went through a quick Rammstein phase as well from what I remember. Anything metal I was eating up. I was also into angsty teenage rock like Bowling For Soup, Forever the Sickest Kids, and so on. Katy Perry, 3OH!3, and Metro Station were pretty big for me as well.
My taste got heavier over the next two years as I got into Lamb of God, Meshuggah, Cannibal Corpse, Mastodon, Slayer, The Monolith Deathcult, Kamelot...the list is too long. I explored Daft Punk in a big way, got into Deadmau5, and picked up a lot of trance, drum n' bass, and hardstyle. I also got into stoner rock through bands like Kyuss, Unida, Monster Magnet, and Spiritual Beggars. Listening to Mr. Lif got me into hip hop too, though I didn't develop that until later.
I graduated high school in 2011 and spent the summer listening to a lot of Hendrix, Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, and other big names of the past with a talented, guitar-playing friend. I went to Egypt and Europe as well and got into Arabic music (traditional and pop). Europe only increased my love of trance music as it was the first place I had ever been where people not only knew names like Armin van Buuren and Paul Oakenfold, but revered them. Musically, I was home.
I came home and entered a slum phase where I was constantly between jobs and living at home for a period of 8 months. I felt like I had lost my autonomy and, due to other family issues at the time, fell into a slump. I began listening to a lot of Alice in Chains, Tool, Mountain Goats, and a lot of hip hop. Reggae too for a bit, though I can't remember any artists beside Damian Marley and Chuck Fenda.
I joined the Army in April of 2012 and remember the bus ride to my specialty school after basic, I was listening to lots of Stone Temple Pilots and Soundgarden. At my first unit in Korea, I became friends with another Soldier who had similar taste in rock to me, so we fed off of each other. Another guy got me into the Black Angels, which got me into other bands such as Wooden Shjips, The Sizlacks, Dead Meadow, and various others. Most of my buddies in the unit got me into a lot of hip hop and RnB as well. As a white guy from the country living with mostly black and hispanic dudes from the east coast and deep south, I got into a lot of new stuff and had a lot of run at hip hop clubs all over Seoul.
Fast forward to now, my tastes haven't changed much. I married my middle school sweetheart in Sept. of 2013. She helped me, an admitted musical snob, find more appreciation for a lot of pop music, so I don't instantly disregard something just because it gets air time on the radio. Lately I'm listening to lots of psychedelic and stoner rock because all I wanna do is chill these days and I haven't really sought out anything new. But, I'm always discovering something new. This avalanche of text doesn't even come close and my taste in music is limitless; I'm sure I've left out tons of artists and genres.