I don't know how other people came into their favorite artists or genres, but I was that kid who would put a blank tape in his boombox and hit "record" when the radio played a song that I loved. It didn't matter if I knew who the artist actually was (or the actual title of the song, for that matter), but the amount of music I came across in junior high pretty much informed the rest of the music I would listen to later on.
I had a pretty wide range of interests, from grunge to hip hop to jazz, which remains a characteristic of my love of music. There aren't many genres I won't listen to (except for country, which I can't stand).
MTV used to play music videos at one time, believe it or not. There were tons of great programs for those of us without a lot of radio options: Alternative Nation, 120 Minutes, Yo! MTV Raps, so on and so forth...It was a pretty phenomenal resource until it became some kind of patient zero for this shitty reality TV epidemic we've been living through for the last 25 years.
Anyway, these are just a small taste of my collection, much of which I still enjoy listening to these days. I have some really good memories attached to a lot of these albums, as I'm sure many of you have strong memory-based attachments to the albums that made you who you are today.
Bjork - "Debut"
Roni Size - "New Forms" (This video is just disc one, but this was my introduction to drum'n'bass as a genre and I couldn't get enough)
Soundgarden - "Badmotorfinger"
Mudhoney - "Five Dollar Bob's Mock Cooter Stew"
Miles Davis - "Bitches Brew"
Digable Planets - "reachin' (a new refutation of time and space)"
Arrested Development - "3 Years, 5 Months, and 2 Days in the Life Of..."
Rollins Band - "Weight"