Joe is a bearded 24-year-old who tends to wax philosophical. Julian is 18 with a cloud of frizzy hair who plays drums for 13 bands. On a recent Saturday, I ran into both of them at a Bushwick swap meet. This was held in a warehouse. There were 4-dollar Bloody Marys, David Hasselhoff tote bags, used t-shirts and furniture that you could only pray didn't come from someone's bedbug-infested loft. Joe and Julian were monitoring the influx of used CDs at the swap meet's used music section. Neither can remember their first concert, only that they've always been going to shows.

These are guys who did not spend their high school days getting high behind the 7-Eleven. They never threw keggers in the woods, dry humped in your mom's basement or raided their grandparents' liquor cabinet. At least not most of the time.

Instead they were packing themselves into as many sweaty basements and concert venues as they could, listening to bands the rest of us wouldn't hear about until three years later, if we were lucky enough to hear about them at all. These shows were defined by how loud, dirty and sweaty they were, and often took place in venues of questionable structural integrity.

"Music is a kind of way of a large group of people syncing," Joe said. "It's inescapable for the people experiencing it. It aligns people in a much simpler way than most forms of communication do."

Joe and Julian were also shilling the latest few issues of Showpaper. That publication carries the most comprehensive listings for all-ages shows in the tri-state area. Essentially a folded sheet of newsprint, with a bi-weekly circulation of 10,000, it lists concerts taking place at the Highline Ballroom right alongside those taking place in someone's Connecticut basement. It is distributed at venues such as Brooklyn Tattoo, Cake Shop, Sarah Lawrence College and Soft Skull Press. The paper is advertising-free. It threw its most-recent benefit, called the Showpaper Intramural Film Festival, at Vaudville Park. That ended in a basement dance party.

It also boasts missed connections ads. One read: "The two brothers near the door at the 171 lombardy party-if I get pregnant from our threesome will our babies count as inbred??"

If it seems odd that kids who grew up on the Internet are finding out about live music through what's essentially a zine, keep in mind that each issue is often the only tangible piece of memorabilia for shows that leave you $5 poorer with only a stamp on your hand to show for it, played by bands that may or may not exist in a few months, who may or may not ever put out a legitimate album.

It's a "historical record. Let's say we'd built it as a site on Geocities or something," said Julian. "It would have disappeared."

I asked if they have one favorite moment from a show. Joe scoffed.

"It's been a lifetime of favorite moments," he said. "The main reason I'm involved in this is for the unique unexpected moments. There have been thousands."

Like, for example, when the two went to go see Dan Deacon play in Bushwick back in 2007. Julian was so excited that he showed up seven hours early, hanging around out front until the first band started. To hear him and Joe tell it, the place was so packed that when the fire department finally showed up (the warehouse wasn't quite licensed to put on shows), they couldn't even make their way through the crowd to shut it down. Instead the firemen retreated to the basement, cutting the power supply for the entire building. Only then, when the structure went dark and thousands of kids were stranded in a packed room with no electricity or sound equipment, did the band give up and finally stop playing.

Julian and Joe both laughed when I asked them about the future of the music industry, which when you think about it, is a fair response in light of a scene that has expanded the definition of "concert space" to include anything from the local YMCA to a coffee shop to someone's cleverly-named living room-and whose members are generally in at least one band of their own.

"That's like asking what the future of civilization is," said Julian. "It's not going away. People aren't going to stop making music. The average artist is making more money than ever. You don't need a huge backer anymore, you can go online and just market yourself."

"Kids are people at a stage in their lives when they're most excited about music," said Joe. "They're forming impressions about what they like and don't like that will last them the rest of their lives."

"What else are kids gonna do?" Julian said.

Erica Sackin writes and lives in Brooklyn. She was once a contestant in the Ms. G Train competition, but lost. 'The Spandex Report' covers the lives of the youngs.