oof

in 1999 you had the ability to get into a music shop, load the cd and test listen to it. Or just go through the music charts. Or wish for a specific song on radio.

Also 1999 already had Napster, Morpheus and others.

You buy a Sony CD and decide to play it on your computer.

Your computer now has a rootkit installed.

i'm curious now

usually censorship is used to replace a strong word with a milder one, or to change the meaning of the text

what word in this meme was so egregious that OP saw fit to replace it with "fucking"

No wonder piracy was so popular

You listen to it anyway and it grows on you.

Conversely, you buy a CD from a band you've never heard of just because you like the album art or maybe even the title or the band name, and you find out it's a god damn masterpiece from start to finish. This is how I discovered Audioslave almost 20 years ago and it's the best $14 I ever spent. I still have the disc btw and it still plays perfectly.

Then you realize you aren't paying $20 a month, and you buy a new album, that you fucking OWN forever.

More like $20.

Yeah except in 1999 you could go to Sam Goody or The Warehouse or whatever, and listen to the album in the store before buying, especially if it was a new release.

Personally, I was going to the public library and checking out it CDs from there.

If it's 1999, you would go to a record store if you wanted to buy an album and depending on the store the would have a sampler disk and could tell you if it sucked or not. Also, if the songs where good you would have billboard to tell you how good it was as well as your local radio station.

Or you could just open Napster and download the whole album for free.

You would rarely buy random cd's or whatnot. You would hear one or 2 songs on the radio, or from a friend, or you already loved the artist. You'd loan it from the library, or spend 30 min listening to it in the store.

Then you would come home and set it on repeat for weeks. Even the tracks on the CD that were less good, you would appreciate.

I definitely preferred how much I cared for the music back then a lot more. Even pre-Napster.

At least you fucking OWN the thing, tho

$10 would get a you a CD where the 3rd track is also the last.

The better comparison with Spotify is that it's a mafia that you pay $11 / month for the rest of your life and they give you a bunch of free music but if you ever stop paying, they'll bust into your house and take it all away.

Vs. spending $10 for an album you might not like but you can sell it, give it to a friend, or put it in storage for 10 years until you find it during a move and realize your tastes changed and now this album fucking rocks (happened to me with a few things).

Oh and Bandcamp ftw. You can listen to most albums free for a few times and when you buy it, you own it forever w/o DRM - plus if you buy a hardcopy, you get a digital one included. I used to use Napster like that - as a shit quality preview of an album I might end up buying later.

There were so many shitty albums I bought for $16 in the early 90s (even worse, that's like $30 now) and had the exact experience in the meme. Things like we loved the first Suicidal Tendencies album, bought the second and were 'wtf is this?' The only way we had to pick out death metal was based on the cover art and record label... put it in the CD player, okay, good guitar sound... just have to wait until the guy sings.... that pretty much decided it.

Where the hell you buying CDs for $10 in 1999?

It's 1999 and I'm standing in a music store listening to a few new albums I might buy, while talking with the other audio nerds about upcoming releases and musicians I haven't even heard of before.

I kinda miss it. Like Libraries, but I get to buy and keep whatever I enjoy.

Discovery of new music is so much easier now with Spotify/YouTube/etc. In the past you had a slim-to-none chance of coming across a band/artist/album outside your local scene, no matter what the genre. Back then you kind of had to be "in the know" for that to happen.

I pirated all mine.

Reminds me of boxed software, too. You check the compatibility, the features that included one must-have new feature. Buy it and discover what vaporware is. It started me on the ethics of pirating, finding out if it actually works, and then, and only then, buying a real copy. I donate to developers on Linux, now.

And Bandcamp.

It‘s 2023, you can still listen to the same shitty music, because it is yours to keep.

$10 for an album? You lucky dog, here one album CD costs at that time around $25.

napster :)

CDs were up to $16 when I was making less that $10/hr at work. 😢

discogs is the shit. fuck spotify, and their corporate plants in every other "personalized" playlist they generate. at least you have something to show for your money 25 years later and a company can't decide to arbitrarily stop offering the music etc.

But you owned it. So you could sell the CD and recoup almost all of your money.

It's 1999. Why are you paying for music at all? Napster still exists for you.

It was like that though.

If you got 3 tracks off a hip hop album you’d nailed it.

Yes, there are exceptions, we now call them classics

I bought Finger11 for paralyzed and then realized it was by far their best track.

Back in those days you could listen to the record/cassette/cd in the store before you bought it. They would have these headphones you could use.

So it's not as big of a problem as this meme would make it seem.

Napster was reparations for Soul Asylums Strangers With Candy album.

When people who didn't like rock/metal bought an Extreme album because they thought all the songs were like More Than Words.

Try $20 of disappointing CD.

And there are only 6 tracks, and also the CD was $20.

Somebody bought the Chris Gaines album.

I didn't used internet in the 1990s. But I used it in the early 2000s and Kazaa was my music goldmine, even when I downloaded something I was looking for.

Worse: you're a DJ in 1998 and spend $12 for a 6 minute B-side.

If it happened to you in 1999 then you are just probably dumb as fuck because plenty of available information across the nation (~$16-18)

If it happened in 1992, you would be big sad and harder to find out more info pre-buy ($10-12)

it probably would be worse if you bought it in the most expensive format

Bought reanimation by Linkin park. The mecha album art is better than the remixes imo. Also the larger reason I bought it lol.

Someone explain this format to me, please. Why is one weird highlighted?

And that's how I found death metal and grindcore.... fucking 20 for a CD it better be full of insane and no lazy filler. At 200 BPM you literally cannot be lazy.

I had a cd burner since 93 when I was in 8th grade. We used to just copy each other's cds.

I see puddle of mudd in this and I don't like it

Couldn't you just get it back to the store and get a refund?