Filtering Pop Culture Overload

My 16-year-old just came back from four weeks at camp with a five-page, handwritten list from a friend naming bands she should listen to. His choices are all great -- ranging from the Velvet Underground to Broken Social Scene -- but they're just names on a page, and would take months to bone up on.

This got me thinking about how musical knowledge is acquired these days. My last post discussed how I became musically cognizant, to the point of obsession (knowing the names of B-sides, etc), helping qualify me to write for Rolling Stone. Part of it included reading Rolling Stone itself. But how does someone of my daughter's or my own advancing age find out about music these days?