Same here. I had 2 x 12" speakers mounted in the rear deck of my VW Bug. Live at Leeds, Made In Japan and Rockin’ The Fillmore were in heavy rotation.
When I was growing up I had an Aunt that was only four years older than me and an Uncle who was five years older and I practically lived at their house. I absorbed a lot of music that way. I still remember my Aunt having a sleepover and everyone dancing to Ice Ice Baby. I also had an Aunt who was thirteen years older and I absorbed a lot from her and her best friend.
When I started developing my own musical taste we had mixtapes and then we had CDs. It was usually that we would play music when our friends were around, or we’d just say, “You need to get the new Madonna album, it’s so good!” Then we’d discuss it after. And we’d write song lyrics on notes in class. I had a special song for each of my friends. I was really into Madonna in my teens. My best friend gave me a birthday gift that was kind of an art project with a line written from every Madonna song that applied to our friendship. I still have it. And she’s still my friend though we don’t get to see one another that often. We text a lot.
But yeah looking back on it, a lot of it was just being around when someone played new music for you.
We walked down to ol’ Mr. Schroeder’s television repair shop (What? That was the only place to buy records in our town in the early '60s).
And we’d show each other the new 45s and tried to decide which one to buy with our minuscule allowances… we were so young that we didn’t know any of the artists! So we chose based on titles (“Ooh, Telstar! That’s named after a satellite, I bet it’s cool!”).
Then the Beatles changed everything, and we bought every single (we didn’t realize, when we were singing along with the B-sides, that those wouldn’t be on any album for decades).
And we mowed and shoveled until we had enough spending money for the albums. We’d often “go in on” an album together, take it over to Bob’s Basement, turn off most of the lights, and just bask in Music Our Parents Hated.
Our first Dylan, first Dead, first Doors, first Jefferson Airplane, first Zappa: everything happened in Bob’s Basement.
Long before tapes…
That’s the spirit @Spice_Weasel and @digs ! The truly human experience of sharing tunes. The mechanics of how things were shared is most interesting, but the human connections and the stories is what I started this about.
I can remember when I was about 8 when my two cousins Sissy and Mickey Sue came up from Texas and played Sugar, Sugar by the Archies on our old 45 player. The swung and danced to the song, it showed me the physical emotion that a song could invoke. That shared a real life interpretation of what music could do.
And I thank them for that. 
I discovered the Beatles through my Uncle because he had the compilation CDs. Sometime in the 90s I guess. He would tell me about all the rumors and “I buried Paul” and told me if you played a Beatles record backward you’d hear Satanic voices (which he thought was cool, I gathered.) Well I must not have bought all that scaremongering because I bought the same compilation and played it endlessly, and I had a big poster of the Beatles in their cutest phase and I kissed Paul every night before bed. True story.
I think the Beatles may have been the only thing I had in common with that man. We did not get along, but I guess we always had that.
ETA: And I discovered Rush in college. I worked the late shift at a campus Jimmy John’s and the whole place was rigged with an awesome sound system. My coworker brought burned mixes of Rush and we’d talk about it for hours until the drunk rush about 2am.
What, no one here ever had their Zune get squirted on by a friend’s Zune? No one ever experienced the delightful pleasure of being on the receiving end of an unexpected squirt from the stranger sitting next to you on the bus? Oh, Zune squirts, you were taken from us much too soon.
In college I can’t remember a time when we all listened to something together, though we all listened to WBCN which might count. One exception - when the new Firesign Theatre album came out, we all gathered in the room of whoever bought it first.
Late '70s and early '80s for me as a teenager. We did the same things that several others have already mentioned:
- Go to each other’s houses to listen to a new album that one of us had bought
- Making copies of albums onto cassette tapes
- Occasionally making mixtapes (I did more of that in college than in high school)
Yep, “Aqualung” is the one I remember blasting. The title tune and “Locomotive Breath” (especially the intro of LB).
I did have a brief period of exchanging LPs with a friend, but that ended when claims were made about a newfound scratch on a Deep Purple disc.
mmm
Never heard of Zune, nor squirting, until now. Interesting. It was an iPod-like device; one could send a song to every other Zune in a 30-foot radius, even to strangers (they would have the option of accepting the offer or not).
I never really did share, back in the 1970s. It was more, “Hey, I got a new album, wanna come over and listen to it?” kind of thing.
If we were making tapes in those days, it was more setting up our Sanyo cassette recorder’s microphone next to the record player’s speakers. The result was less than good, but it was adequate. Yeah, you might loan that cassette to somebody, but that was the extent of sharing.
Yes, this. I graduated in 1971. Cassettes were fairly new, and nobody that I knew had a stereo system that included a cassette player that could record off vinyl. A couple of guys had reel-to-reel and would record albums, but that was of no help to those of us that didn’t have that technology.
My dad and brother assembled a Heathkit receiver/amplifier for dad’s audio system. Man, I hadn’t thought about that thing in years! It worked pretty damn good, as I recall.
Nobody remembers that the Walkman had two headphone outputs so two people could listen at the same time!?
If you mean sharing as in listen together or let a friend borrow it, of course people did that. And, eventually, when people had the technology+budget to record onto tape/cassette/DAT/CD/etc., we did that, too.
That is sharing in its most basic form. One of my favorite way to share is to go to concerts, where you share a musical experience with others.
One of mt best memories is taking a date to see Genesis and she said she didn’t know who they were. Until she started screaming that’s Phil Collins! Oh what a night. 
Another time I took a date to see Plant and Page. She had never heard of them until they came out and started playing. She screamed, that’s Led Zeppelin! Another great night.
If that counts, me an a half dozen or more friends would pile into a car and make the one hour drive to Hollywood to see X, the Blasters, the Crowd, the Dickies, or Circle Jerks. Midweek, it would be one of the places with a $3 door in Costa Mesa or Santa Ana to see TSOL or Social Distortion.
I owned several Walkmans (and later Discmans), but never owned one with the two headphone jacks.
The first model had two jacks to head off universal criticism that listening to music alone in public was deviant and rude. When no one used the second jack, it was removed and the attitude about listening to music alone in public changed forever.
That reminds me of listening to tapes in the car during long trips and enjoying them together!
Which reminds me of zoning out to MTV with my housemates. All damn day!
That ain’t working.