Will: In both genres time has, like water running through a rock formation, eroded the soft stuff and left the peaks standing.

As someone involved in geophysics that image strikes a very appropriate chord!

It's been fascinating out here to see what songs are known and sung. It's also fascinating to see that the more "commercial" side of things (what's playing in clubs and such) is largely Rap, Trance and Dub-Step music that sounds about 3-4 years "out of date" compared to the UK. The local "commercial" music seems to be mainly Rap or Metal, and the lyrics often switch into English, sometimes inappropriately. I was walking through a mall with quite loud piped music the other day and the Russian lyrics suddenly switched to : "I want to lick your balls until you come", repeated 3 times until they switched back to Russian. I was an obvious foreigner as I stopped dead and did a distinct "double take"!

Brian: What Rob is describing (and I'm genuinely fascinated by it) is a process by which songs are accessible to the generation below the one that first enjoyed them, but as the result of a more complex series of processes that no doubt involves peer-to-peer transmission but also Youtube, Spotify, CDs, LPs, etc. There's always a fixed reference point to return to. Of course that also means that those songs will be available for ever, for anyone who wishes to access them.

Yes, you've hit the nail on the head there in terms of transmission processes. And, as someone else pointed out, there are also loads of "Best Rock Guitar Tunes" books and similar. I know that some of the songs in my "inter-generational list" feature in several of these books.