This thread has been pretty interesting to read. I'll try to keep mine short.
Up until I was about 8 I was mainly into the stuff that my parents listened to. I was introduced to loads and loads of 80s pop, 90s stuff like Massive Attack and Everything But The Girl and George Michael and some more interesting stuff like Bjork. As an 8 year old I found Bjork fascinating.
During primary school I started to get really into music but I was still only listening to my parents' music and the stuff I heard on the radio. I started to find lots of favourite bands and I got my first CD (I was stupid and refused to move on from tapes for ages).
When I arrived at secondary school my father was a big Green Day fan and I started to get into them. At my age Green Day fans seemed few and far between and my love for the band got me in with the cool crowd... ahhh, school and its subcultures.
I moved a couple of years later and my taste in music changed again. It was nu metal's big time and I was really into the whole thing. I pretended to hate pop music to look cool and I developed a pretty bad attitude towards music (as young teenagers often do). I discovered a lot of bands that would eventually get me into metal, though.
Once I'd got over the whole 'pop sucks' rubbish I started to get into bhangra and went back to electronic-based stuff and I wanted to learn more and more about the music coming from Canada.
A little bit later I found last.fm and in those days we had no radio stations or anything like that... I used to look at profiles for band names I'd never seen before and then have a listen.
That's about it, I guess. This is me now. I still like all of the stuff I liked in the past 20 years and I'm on the internet searching for more.