My first job out of high school I got was in an office of a limousine company and one of my first tasks there was data entry. I was using the workstation of one of my bosses who I thought was a "cool dude" and at his desk he had a single CD, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' Greatest Hits. I probably had only even heard the name previously due to the ubiquity of Mary Jane's Last Dance on MTV, which was a song I disliked (tho the video was and is to this day very memorable). Decided to give it a try to dull the monotony of hours in front of a computer and from the opening riffs of American Girl I was hooked. I listened to that album on repeat nearly every hour of every workday for my first 2-3 weeks on that job. It's one of the earliest catalysts I can think of for me expanding my appreciation for music beyond that which was being fed to me by MTV and the radio. It completely opened my mind to what I'd previously considered "old people music" and lead me to the nearly all-encompassing appreciation for music I have today.
So in a way, Tom Petty was directly responsible for me being able to button thru the radio and be able to sing along to a Herman's Hermits song one moment, an Offspring song the next and a Carly Rae Jepsen song after that.
Kind of funny how you can go a decade and a half of your life without thinking about something like that and then suddenly realize how inspirational someone was to you.
TL;DR, RIP Tom.