Even as a relatively well-informed individual when it comes to popular music's origins, I take for granted the ease with which styles are meshed and boundaries are erased in today's interpretation of the medium. Basically, nowadays you can record near anything, and you can do the same with listening. Which sounds like, and is for the most part, a great liberty to have, but there is generally something that's lost when boundaries are erased. (See video games for example?) My reading of the earlier days of recording is that the forays into new styles were borne out of a deep reaction to sounds that seemed exotic and simply beyond one's conception of reality at the time. Precisely because of the sheer volume of what's available now, I'd conjecture that such experiences are significantly rarer, unless somehow artificially simulated. Put another way, with the boundaries goes some (though not all, granted) of the mystery. And with the mystery goes some of the visceral kick. It is too early to say whether this phenomenon is actual, not imagined, and whether sheer volume can overcome any deficiencies in the medium, if any. But I have my concerns.