What are your MC's music tastes? Genre? Album? Artist? What about your antagonist, or any supporting characters you may choose. To start, my MC would probably be a huge fan of The Offspring
In my main WIP, I talk about the two main characters' reactions to music a lot. They both have sci-fi amnesia (meaning everything else works perfectly, but their memories before a specific moment are entirely blank, which only occurs with sci-fi amnesia, not real amnesia.) Every experience is new and visceral, and they discover a ton of music. I basically split my own taste down the middle. I thoroughly enjoy the majority of genres and eras from the last hundred years, which is a lot to give one character but allows me to speak with some knowledge for each of them. Even though they share a lot of favorites in common, she prefers 40's vocal jazz to his 60's bebop. He prefers early Beatles. She loves Abby Road. She prefers 70's singer/songwriter and folk to his 70's hard rock. He likes trippy, more electronic indie. She prefers indie folk, and so on. I did something similar with literature, only in that case, he's into a lot of my least favorite stuff.
My first MC is pretty mainstream, he's into the 80'ies radio station My 2nd MC prefers classic and jazz - however he's not focused on a style, he listenes to what he likes.
Ha, well that's an easy one for me to answer, because my main character IS a musician of Hungarian /Roma descent. He's a home-taught, very skilled fiddle player (like his father), who grew up in the 1870s in western Kansas. He loves all kinds of music, and has an ear for picking up new tunes and fitting in with different styles of music. Playing his fiddle is one of his favourite things to do. He loves playing with other musicians when he gets the chance. However, he has never had a chance to listen to serious music, like classical music. That pleasure awaits....
My MC's taste in music is stodgy for a 24 year-old in New York City in 1980 (to my MC, rocking out is Elton John). He grew up in the tightly protected bubble of the world of classical music in Russia and was exposed to very little contemporary music from the West. His favorites are Beethoven, Chopin, and Gershwin, and he can't for the life of him understand why his girlfriend loves The Babys and Van Halen. His mentor and patron are into classical, The Beatles, and Billy Joel, his girlfriend's best friend is into New Wave (I'm thinking she's a Devo fan), and the antagonist is into a particularly narrow parameter of classical music. In fact, I'm not so sure the protagonist would truly be into classical at all were it not for the social power and position it's given her.
