I got into music in the early 1980s at which point (if we take the start of 'rock music' as an arbitrary 1967) there was about 15 years of music to catch up on.

Now it's 50 years of music a young teenager has to catch up on. It's not surprising that there's a lot of great artists they (or even people in their 20s and 30s like, presumably, the teacher in question) have never heard of let alone heard.

If we go back further and include jazz and classical - I mean jazz alone you could spend several lifetimes catching up.

In theory digital access and streaming means it's a lot easier to catch up for them than it was for us. When I was about 14 (1982) this youth came into class and was going on about someone called 'Jimi Hendrix' - he'd watched a VHS of his Montrose concert. Nowadays we could just go home and stream it to hear, even see, who he was on about. Back then you'd need to find it and buy it.

No, I don't think we'll be the last generation. Hi-fi mags were saying that 40 years ago, the people writing those editorials are probably mostly all dead. And yet here we are and not a week goes by without some new turntable or CD player appearing on the market, let alone equipment for streaming. And new speaker companies seem to appear almost every day.