> you'd listen to radio or MTV a lot more

The selection in these channels was the tribe back then. They were the "bottleneck" of pop culture.

From around 2000 with broadband etc, "payola" (broadcasters being coerced by record companies to play their flagship songs "in heavy rotation") is less and less effective.

As a consequence, I think the "current fashion" of music seems less defined.

I believe this is the origin of the '90s kids' meme. Not too long ago there was one culture. Then the internet came along and there was a gathering place for fans of every obscure anime and political system.

I don't miss the restrictiveness of a single culture and the expectation to fit into it, but with the benefit of hindsight I can't say it was a terrible culture, given all it had to do.

There have always been multiple cultures. This is such a weird statement I don't even really know how to argue against it since to me it seems so self evident, but I suppose I'll try. Since the subject is music, I suppose we can start there.

The sort of people you found at, say, a metal show in the 80s and the sort of people you found at a dance club playing the early era of house music were wildly different. Even if you keep it within rock, the overlap of the audience seeing The Cure would be wildly different from those seeing Judas Priest.

Anime? Even before the internet became what it is today, you could go to a comic book store and hang out. There was significant overlap between the comic book/dungeons & dragons/anime crowds.

There have been social spaces and places to meet people within specific cultures for forever.

There was never one culture, but the fragmentation was far more coarse.

I was into D&D, so I was exposed to anime, comics, Monty Python, Mel Brooks, and Tom Lehrer, because those were a certain subculture.

I was never a comic-book nerd, but I could probably name a dozen different series from image comics in the 90s because I was surrounded by people who read them.

I flat out dislike watching Mel Brooks movies, but I can quote about 90% of Spaceballs or Blazing Saddles because that was a part of the vocabulary of that group.

Before the internet, there has always been a gathering place already for each culture. In my teens, it was the weekend punk hardcore matinees. Before internet, kids passed out fliers to their upcoming shows. Kids invite fellow kids because there isn’t much going on during weekends.

There were multiple sub-cultures warring against each other and especially against pop MTV back then.

Mainstream always coexisted wirh smaller cultures.

I think putting Britney Spears, Rage Against the Machine, Moby, Ol'Dirty Bastard and Santana (all had top hits in 1999 with rotation on MTV) into the same "tribe" is painting strokes as broad as the ocean.

It's a mixed bag; on the one side I agree that during that era, people were exposed to a somewhat broad range of musical styles if they watched TV or listened to radio - early to mid teen me would be exposed to the likes of Madonna, Rammstein, Eminem and Slipknot all in one day. But as someone else pointed out, it was all within the "bubble" of what was popular at that time, and the options to break out of there were limited because there were only so many music television and radio channels, and they would have a limited playlist of <1000 songs at a time, probably even less than that.

Nowadays if you have a streaming subscription or even Youtube, you have instant access to millions of songs and a multitude of curators creating playlists to fit any mood. Granted, Spotify and co will curate some popular playlists, and discovering curators outside of that bubble takes some more effort. But it's there.

We live in interesting times where on the one side we can be overwhelmed by choice, while at the same time delighted with new discoveries. Where budding artists can create from their proverbial basement and self-publish to a potential audience of billions.