Writing thought.

[randomling]

If your characters had their formative teenage years during the 80s or later, and they are music fans, and they grew up in the US or UK the Now! That's What I Call Music series is a really excellent resource for finding out what kind of music they might have enjoyed as a youngster. All the track listings for both series (the US and UK versions) are on Wikipedia, and so far I haven't had trouble finding any of the songs on Youtube.

I'm currently using this to do some deep background on my current characters, whose teen years were in the late 90s/early 00s. (Yes, I was a teenager myself in 1999. My memory is terrible, and actually hearing the tracks helps.)