Was 2005 I think, there was an unnamed 2 second clip from Dir en Grey on German TV and I wanted to hear the rest of it because I was addicted to the anime on RTL2
My google-fu led me to some chinese server hosted on a toaster behind a 56k modem, but they had pictures of the bands next to the download links and therefore my first band was … Shulla! Their singer looked a bit like Kyo in the clip lol
My next steps were random songs from rotation blogs (Vasalla, Psycho le Cemu, Plastic Tree, etc), Animexx (German anime forum) introduced me to some bands (Dir en Grey, Kagerou, D’espairsray, Malice Mizer, Gazette, the usual stuff) and at some point I ended up on Batsu and caught rare indies disease