Some sample lists here:
and more for each year and other categories, as well as covering other countries.
I was 11 to 17 in this period, so basically middle and high school. My favorites:
Pearl Jam
Soundgarden
Alice in Chains
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Metallica
Queensryche
Nine Inch Nails
Tool
Many of the “hair metal” bands
Older bands I loved were:
Pink Floyd
Led Zeppelin
Rush
CSNY
etc.
I recall Midnight Oil was big at that time. Remember listening to their album in my house in northern Thailand, where I lived from 1988-90.
I was 12-18 in this period.
In my neighborhood, heavy metal (of the thrash sort) was very popular in this time period. Hip hop was big, as well (lots of great stuff around this time, like De La Soul’s “Three Feet High and Rising,” Public Enemy’s “Fear of a Black Planet,” Beastie Boys “Paul’s Boutique” and “Check Your Head” and, not as mainstream, stuff like Boogie Down Productions with KRS-One.)
Hair metal had its adherents as well, until the end of the time period you mentioned. There was also a huge neo-soul (or whatever you want to call it) presence with Boys II Men, Color Me Badd and stuff like that. (Our high school’s homecoming theme song in 1992 was “End Of the Road,” for instance.)
But the end of the time period you mentioned, what used to be “alternative” music had entered the mainstream. So when I think of the music most of my peers were listening to in 1992, 1993, we of course have the Seattle bands well represented, but also stuff like REM, Urge Overkill, Juliana Hatfield, Paul Westerberg, Smashing Pumpkins, Blind Melon, The Cranberries, Cracker, The Breeders, Gin Blossoms, Soul Asylum, the Spin Doctors, Veruca Salt, Material Issue, etc.
But music was also quite “cliquish” back then, or at least it was around here. You had your metal kids, your goth kids, your alternative kids, your top 40 kids, your rap kids, etc., so it was hard to say what the typical teenager listened to. Then again, you can just look at the Top 40 charts for those years, and that really is a pretty good reflection of what, on the whole, teenagers were listening to back then. But it would vary fiercely by what subsection of teenagers you were looking at.
Three more important points about the period in question:
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Geographically, this is when a celebrated musical hotspot shifted from Manchester, UK’s rave scene (peaked 1989) to Seattle’s grunge scene (peaked 1992).
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This is when “hip-hop” began to compelement “rap,” as a more in inclusive term (musically and in other style genres). Toward the end of this period, acts like Pharcyde, Digable Planets, and Us3 were expanding the sonic palette of rap/hip hop to include more jazz and other sounds.
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“World music” became a commercial category, lead by CDs like the David Byrne-curated compilation of 70s-80s Brazilian pop. Soon, the Putumayo clothing company’s mix CDs were the sort of thing college students and aging-hippie-turned-stockbroker types could agree were pretty cool.
I’m pretty sure that, somewhere in that period, Jesus Jones saved rock & roll.
A good books to check out is Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad, devoting a chapter each to key indie bands in the US who led up to Nirvana. Great book: https://www.amazon.com/Our-Band-Could-Your-Life/dp/0316787531
Reading these posts reminds me of how much I miss the days when you could go to the store and buy a cassette or CD. When artists actually released full records of material. Before the “iTunes Age.”
FWIW, I was 17-23 during this time and I listened to a TON of music among a few different categories. Most of which has been mentioned already. There were some great rap records (it wasn’t called Hip-Hop back then), metal records and grunge/alternative records released during this era. The more I think about it, the more diverse these years seem.
Anyway, some of the artists I enjoyed then (not yet listed):
LL Cool J
Run DMC
Billy Idol
Stone Temple Pilots
Prince
Janet Jackson
The Cult
Mr. Big
Primus
Queensryche
Skid Row
Type O Negative
Extreme
I was exactly within the college-aged demographic at the time (started college 1987, finished BA in 1992). (Hey, **SykoScotty **and I are the same age!)
For me, it was punk, New Wave, Goth, college “alternative”, and a little bit of jazz and blues (live shows mostly). I actually saw Nirvana play a tiny club about a year before “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was released. Great show. Saw Stone Temple Pilots at an MTV spring break show in Daytona Beach.
Also saw Ice-T’s Body Count show around that time, despite the best efforts of the Jacksonville City Council to ban it. 
There was a thriving “underground” scene even in Jacksonville, FL, if you knew where to go.
Of course, a lot of kids listened to top 40 pop. And in Jacksonville, a LOT of kids listened to country music. Both were ubiquitous, and I can still remember the lyrics to country songs I don’t like. :mad:
It’s worth noting that a lot of white American kids were into rap/(hip-hop), even during this pre-Slim-Shady era – and sometimes even the same kids who also liked alternative rock like the Cramps or X.
The rap that penetrated this particular white boys’ consciousness in the early 90s included Boo-Ya Tribe, Cypress Hill, and Black Sheep.
Right there right then?
You didn’t ask what pre-teens were listening to, but that was my age bracket for this period. Madonna, Vanilla Ice, Boyz II Men, New Kids on the Block, Weird Al Yankovic, and They Might Be Giants formed the foundation for my actual entry into music-listening in 1994.
Worth noting that U2 released The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby during this period, both albums that received huge airplay. REM released the Losing My Religion video, another huge one. For years you couldn’t listen to the radio for an hour without hearing it. Other songs that were heavily played later in the period were Annie Lennox’s Walking on Broken Glass, Celine Dion’s Cause I’m Your Lady, and Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Water Under the Bridge.
My mom was playing lots of Paul Simon, Billy Joel, Genesis, and Bobby McFerrin. My dad was still listening to CCR and The Beatles.
I’m not sure how this part is different now. Full albums are still released (I can’t remember if I’ve ever even bought a single on iTunes. Everything I’ve bought in the past few years that I see has been entire albums of material.) But even back then, you had artists that were more “singles” artists than album artists. I personally have not noticed any change in that regard, or at least my buying habits have not. At the music boards I participate in (well, the ones I used to participate in; I’ve been a little quiet on the music front the last couple years), the vast majority of talk was about albums, not singles. I mean, look at how huge Beyonce’s Lemonade was last year as an entire body of work. This is pretty typical. Kanye (at least to me) is known not for his singles, but for his complete albums (which, like him or not, are actually solid works through and through. Yeezus was fantastic.) Drake this year with “More Life.” Kendrick Lamar with “Damn.” There’s plenty of albums being made.
I’d say WCD has 3 prog epics: Driving the Last Spike, Dreaming While You Sleep, and Fading Lights.
My experience is somewhere between SykoSkotty’s and pulykamell’s. It seems most ARTISTS still experience recorded music production mainly as occasional chunks/projects called “albums,” but most CONSUMERS experience music as discrete tracks, played on YouTube, or a streaming service, or (not so much as a few years ago) mp3s, etc. they’ve purchased for a device.
Actually, this means the consumer’s experience of HEARING music hasn’t changed much – even in the LP/cassette era, many people tended to listen to a track or two in one sitting, and when you LISTENED to songs didn’t have much to do with when the ALBUM had been released – but the consumer’s experience of ACQUIRING music has changed (though not for pulykamell), away from album-sized chunks.
The biggest change for me has been the decline of PHYSICAL OBJECTS – LPs or CDs. I miss having a tangible object to enjoy (for its artwork and liner notes), and to give a firmer sense of ownership. This persisted well into the mp3 era – indeed, the 70s-80s pleasure of making personal “mix-tapes” (cassettes) was revived with cheap and easy CD burning from laptops, circa 1998 to 2013 – but now this practice, too, is on the wane.
But if you were into a certain type of music back then, especially top 40/dance music, buying singles was pretty popular, to my recollection. The vast majority of singles I have and owned are from dance music of that era. Did I really need to hear the entire LA Style album when all I wanted was “James Brown is Dead”?
It certainly is a lot easier to just pick and choose track these days, though, since you don’t have to wait for an official “single” to be released. You can buy whatever track from whatever album, single or not. So I suppose piecemeal consumption like that has increased.
I just don’t think the single is more valued now than it was back then, or that the album was more valued back then than it is now. I’d argue that singles were even MORE important in that era.
I guess I was born just a little too late (1970) to ever be a consumer of vinyl singles. I bought just one: “I Ran,” by A Flock of Seagulls (1983?).
Perhaps others outside my social world were buying lots of singles in the mid-1980s.
(ETA: Well, in 1985 I did get a CD single of Zappa’s Porn Wars – a Laurie Anderson-ization of the Senate hearings Zappa called the “Mothers of Prevention” – but I doubt that made the Billboard Hot 100. 
It was cassette singles for me, not vinyl. I’ve bought maybe two vinyl albums in my lifetime.
Interesting! I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a cassette single, let alone bought one. (They must have been for sale at record shops I went to in the 80s, but I never noticed them).