Today I listened to the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust for the first time. It was released in 1972. Is it really that bewildering to you that not everyone has seen everything that exists already?

"You're one of today's lucky 10,000!" http://xkcd.com/1053/

Wow. So what did you think? (I heard the album a year or so after it came out. Curious how it sounds to someone today.)

I really enjoyed it. It's an odd experience, listening to an album that old and that well known for the first time, because almost inevitably you will have heard some of the songs before without realising where they were from. A couple of times I recognized intros or riffs but couldn't quite place them - probably from movies, advertisements, or just hearing them on the radio.

You also have to try and shed yourself of the intervening 40 years of musical and social development, to try and get a sense of why this album created such a buzz when it was released for the first time (context - I'm about 30 years old, so I wasn't even born until 10 years after this was released, and wasn't socially/musically aware until about 25 years after it came out.)

I rather like XKCDs "Lucky Ten Thousand" on this subject.

The idea is that simply because of birth rate for everything "everyone knows" there are an average 10,000 people per day are discovering it for the first time.

From http://xkcd.com/1053/

I've come across the archive before, but it's still neat.

I was a little surprised to see this getting traction on HN too. It would be like seeing a link to the Wayback Machine or Wolfram Alpha with no qualification.

fwiw I've never even heard of anything like this.

New people are born every day.