The music game – will today’s teens ever know a rock star?

Picking my son up from high school last week, I asked: “Did you hear about Prince?”

The question on his face left me wondering, does that mean “Duh! How could I not have heard?!” or “No, what happened?”

I prodded, “So, did you?”

“Umm, no. What? Did he die?”

“Yes,” I told Alex. “He died. ... I can’t believe everyone in your school wasn’t talking about it.”

“Mama, no one was talking about it,” he said before pushing the dagger in all the way. “No one listens to Prince.”

Ouch.

OK. Prince was my generation, even though he did create great music until the end and his music is still played on the radio. But my 15-year-old’s lack of recognition got me to thinking about how young people hear music now. It’s all different.

Young people still listen to music, but more American teens listen to streaming services such as Spotify and Pandora than to FM broadcast radio, according to a January report from Digital Music News. So, unlike Gen-Xers like me, they don’t have to wait for some radio DJ to play the song they want: Today’s music fans find whatever they want anytime. They create their own stations.

The entire world of music is at their fingertips. To hear a sample of it all, check out www.Everynoise.com. It’s a map of more than 1,400 musical genres containing everything from the broad “Latin” and “Rock” to the the precise “deep Swedish indie pop” and “Turkish alternative.”

The Internet has changed the way people absorb music. It’s connected likes with other likes, encouraging us to form bubbles around our tastes. Opening access to the full spectrum of sound has, in many ways, compelled us to become more isolated. It’s all too easy to live in echo chambers.

With music fans able to listen to the thin slices of spectrum they most enjoy, how is any one artist to cut through the walls and gain a broad audience? Will there ever be another true rock star if everyone is listening to the beats of their own drummer? Will our children ever find their own Prince?

I inherited my love of music from my dad, an early rock aficionado who had a cabinet packed with vinyl LPs. Having little to do before cable TV and video games came along, I spent hours as a child thumbing through that treasure trove listening to everything and discovering the beat of Chuck Berry, the poetry of Simon & Garfunkel, the guitar greatness of Jimi Hendrix and Santana, and falling into a young-girl crush with Herb Alpert.

My father’s icons were what was available to me, so I dove in. The appreciation I developed for those artists gave me the ear that went on to fall in love with the musical genius of Prince and others who broke ground in the 1980s.

When I got to college, my music appreciation class took us back to the beginnings of written Western music – Gregorian chants. Beautiful, even if it didn’t start the party among my classmates. But what I clearly remember is that when the professor reached opera, we woke up. I saw students bobbing their heads to Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” and Wagner’s “Pilgrim’s Chorus.” Hey, we knew those songs! We knew them not because we listened to opera, but because we’d grown up hearing them in the cartoons of “Bugs Bunny.” My generation’s shared time in front of 1970s television sets had become a musical touchstone for us.

For my kids, they will have their own points of recognition, and it will not come from my humble collection of vinyl or what is playing over the airwaves. Heck, my children have never known MTV as a music station. Their touchstones will come from what is piping through their earbuds now. It will come from the game world. I betcha that if it isn’t already happening, the songs that will get today’s teens out on the dance floor will be the songs they’ve absorbed while gaming.

Placement of a song in a video game has become one of the surest ways to build a fan base for an artist, Steve Schnur, worldwide executive of music at Electronic Arts, told Gamezone. Zach Horowitz, president of the Universal Music Group, said inclusion of a song in the “Guitar Hero” series boosts real-world sales by an average of 200 percent to 300 percent.

My son has a thick library of music stored digitally, not in any format that I could thumb through in the way I searched my father’s collection, so I may never know what’s in there.

Earlier this year, when David Bowie died, I drove Alex to school that morning and asked if he knew him. I sang a bit of “Major Tom” and “Changes,” but neither triggered any recognition.

Later that night, Alex came to me and asked “Mama, why didn’t you tell me Bowie wrote ‘The Man Who Sold the World’?”

Surprised, I said, “I didn’t know you’d know that song.”

Turns out, it’s one of his favorite songs, but not because of any reason obvious to me: He knew it as a main song from the game “Metal Gear Solid V.”

I don’t know who these forces are who are the DJs of the gaming world. They aren’t out there publicly like Wolfman Jack was for my father, or the MTV VJs were for me. All I can say is that if they are putting Bowie on their playlist for today’s gamers, then the future of music might be OK after all.

This story was originally published April 26, 2016 at 6:50 PM with the headline "The music game – will today’s teens ever know a rock star?."