Your best friend's downloading "Me & U" by Cassie. Your sister's listening to Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" on her iPod. Your neighbor is addicted to Snoop Dogg's XM station.
The musical landscape is far more fractured than in the days when you and seemingly everybody else on the block knew the latest Michael Jackson song, the new Madonna hit or the current Prince jam. Any tune that was "No. 1 with a bullet," the most frequently played cut on Top 40 radio, blared from cars, storefronts and boomboxes in the park. Regardless of the genre, if the song sat high on the charts, it's likely that anybody with a radio heard it.
Those days have long passed.
Despite the disparate nature of today's pop music consumption and the implosion of the genre's distribution, there are still "tastemakers" out there, people who influence what many of us hear on TV (the last bastion of massive music promotion), commercial radio, surging satellite radio and the Internet. These people aren't publicists, record producers or frustrated artists-turned-critics. They started out as music fans, then parlayed their passions into rewarding careers behind the scenes - on TV, through satellite radio and online - managing to carve out a role exposing listeners to new music. Here are a few of these influential names to know:
Reigning on the radio
Nic Harcourt, author, music director at KCRW in Los Angeles and host of the syndicated radio show "Morning Becomes Eclectic" and its spinoff, "Sounds Eclectic"
A native of Birmingham, England, Harcourt helped launch the careers of Garbage and Moby during his eight years as music director at WDST-FM, a respected radio station in Woodstock, N.Y. In 1998, he became the music director at KCRW, where his influential work as host and director of Morning Becomes Eclectic has garnered praise from such esteemed publications as Esquire.
"A handful of tastemakers can make or break a career," the magazine said in a December 2003 profile. "The most artistically savvy of them all is Nic Harcourt."
Through Morning Becomes Eclectic, he has developed or enhanced the reputations of such varied and notable artists as Norah Jones, Damien Rice, Pete Yorn, Jem, David Gray, Sigur Ros and Coldplay. In late 2000, KCRW and Public Radio International launched Sounds Eclectic, a weekly, two-hour, best-of version of Morning Becomes Eclectic, which airs on weekdays.
