“You could walk into a record store and hear anything, or be recommended anything”
Really? That seems like an outlandish claim. Personally, I’ve found them to be populated and operated by a severly limited array of types. You have hippies on one extreme and metal-heads on another, but they don’t seem all that different to me. Both are merely a different variety of nerd. And I may be stereotyping, but that’s what I find in those places. Various little nerd empires represented: from folk to headbanging to comic books to horror to anime even to something I respect, like classical.
It’s all very different yet the same. Tiny fiefdoms of alternative mainstreams.
You need to find better record stores. The one I used to work next to, PDQ, tended to have “one of each”, a metal head, a punker, a hippie, a prog nerd, country, you name it depending on who was entrusted with the turn table that day there was no limit to what you could hear. There’s nothing with nerds, everybody is a nerd about something.