pretty cool topic actually, very interesting read!
so here is me:
i pretty much started off (and stayed for a veryvery long time) with my dads vinyl-collection which was mostly mid 60's to early 70 blue/rock (Hendrix, Cream, ledZep, RollingStones, Yardbirds) aswell as some Jazz, bigband, soul and ragtime stuff (Ramsey Lewis, Jimmy Smith, Chris Barber, Otis Redding etc..)
only in very late high-school times, when indie rock was the big thing i adapted that aswell, because it was basically the same (white stripes, mando diao, qotsa...)
after that (now college, studying classical music) i pretty much went with the flow as indie became more electronic and dance-oriented bands like that went to my book too (justice, boys noize, the presets, digitalism, doesitoffendyouyeah)
while at the same time trying to find some heavier stuff like monster magnet and danko jones, while still trying to avoid the actual "metal" corner, which had this very cheesy and pretty stupid image (especially in the classical world) but probably being secretly pretty fascinated by that stuff.
as a kind of metal starting point i guess i have to embarrasingly mention apocalyptica, which where kind of accepted to listen to (cellos'n shit)
then something pretty important happend (i was about 20/21 i guess), a german eekly newspaper published an article about highschool bands and how they helped sort of "troubled" poor/immigrant youth to get past race-issues and whatnot and giving sense and direction and blabla, inspirational stuff i guess, but there was one small band (on the cover actually) that already looked kinda cool
http://www.bandnet.de/files/fotos/2919/banner%5B1%5D.jpg
and i looked them up online and also pretty much liked the stuff they did aswell (sort of numetal, gothic-hardrock probably)
which led to the realisation that i pretty much envied them, some northern schoolkids can actually do cool stuff, while i'm stuck studying crappy classical saxophone, that can't be right.
in the article it said they were listening to d'espairsray, DirEnGrey and Girugämesh...
the next day i decided to quit saxophone (actually i still finished it, since i was already 7th semester, so that would've been quite a waste), bought a guitar and started writing music i actually like (and registered at tainted-world at the time)
starting with the more popular stuff deg, despa, giru, mucc and gazette (alongside of finally listening to pantera, slayer etc) i later switched to a bit more underground stuff (thanks to zess, jigsaw and cat i guess, also that comes with studying audio-engineering pretty much) with one major discovery that was boris, which is one reason why i'm probably for the main part in the post-/stoner-/doom-metal/grunge and heavy rock area nowadays.
that beeing said over the past one or two years i've pretty much opend up towards every musical genre there is, may it be ambient drone, noisecore, glitch, or on the other side of things kpop, singer-songwriter, touhou and similarly vntrve and cheesy stuff and everything inbetween, i try to find good things in every piece of music that i encounter, may it either be something interesting and new (or a fresh combination of things), or something well known, but very well executed. there's nearly always something worth appreciating to find.
long post is long