Not my experience at all in the UK, in all my social groups it's basically assumed you have WhatsApp and we aren't all parents

That assumption even extends to the business environments I work in. I'm often in the position of needing to coordinate with groups of customers, third parties and contractors during a change window. WhatsApp is the lowest common denominator

It's one of those things that takes effort. When I was younger I had a constant stream of gigs and recommendations from friends, but that's faded away as we all got older. It felt easier, but that was mainly due to it being a collective effort

You've said you're against streaming, but you could just use it as a way to find new music before buying the physical albums. I use the radio feature in Spotify all the time and often end up finding new music through it - you basically pick an artist or song you like and it makes you a playlist of similar music. You do need to change the radio start point occasionally if the algorithm starts getting repetitive, but it works well enough