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.
A lot of people still bought whole cd's because it had that one song from the radio on it.
You buy the CD because they had a charting single on radio, you’re than disappointed that the rest of the album is a different sound.
Not everyone had internet in the 90s-00s either mate…..
Then you keep listening to it anyways, and it slowly becomes one of your favourite albums of all time.
In the 2000s, some electronics stores where I lived had "jukeboxes" with headphones and a barcode scanner, so you could listen to 30-second snippets of the songs on an album before buying it.
I'm old enough to know the pencil trick to fix a cassette that got eaten by the stereo....
You buy a Sony CD and decide to play it on your computer.
Your computer now has a rootkit installed.
And these days people just install the rootkit, only it's allegedly to prevent game cheating.
And, when called out, everyone tells you you're a paranoid, tinfoil hat wearing, organ trafficking criminal
"most people who had the rootkit installed on their machine dont know what a rootkit is anyways; why should I care?"
-sony's response
I STILL don't buy Sony shit because of that. They booby trapped their product and idiots still buy it. There are plenty of competitors who don't do that.
Or they just haven’t been caught yet.
It would be naive to think it’s a singular event.
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"
My best guess is that it originally was "fucking," someone censored it to something like "hecking," then someone else censored the censor back to "fucking"
No wonder piracy was so popular
1999 piracy mostly consisted of paying for a pirated copy that someone decided to make profit off; most likely, they weren't the person to make the (first!) copy, and they're not even sure what's on the thing they were selling you. It was mostly bootlegging.
In the pre-Internet early 90s, CDs were $15-25 (with inflation, about $40 now)…. And for a lot of music, you had no way of hearing it first. Shoplifting was popular.
You listen to it anyway and it grows on you.
So much this! I don't use Spotify, I buy all my music on Bandcamp. Sometimes I buy an album after just hearing the first song because I find it interesting, but then after a few more listens I realize that the album is not what I thought it was. However, I'm already committed because I paid for it, and it now sits at the top of my collection, so I continue to listen to it. Sometimes it turns out I find qualities in the music that I didn't notice at the first listen, and I learn to like it. Sometimes not, and I ditch it.
This was also the way I discovered music before Spotify even existed, I just never changed my habits (I just used other services than Bandcamp back then). I think more people should try turning off the algorithmic entertainment faucet that is Spotify and try committing a bit more to the music that they listen to. Also, a lot more money goes to the artists this way, Spotify is basically stealing from the artists.
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.
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.
Yeah, I like how this is pretending that the internet didn't exist in 1999 because there was no Spotify or iTunes.
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.
Then you realize you aren't paying $20 a month, and you buy a new album, that you fucking OWN forever.
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.
1999?
Try $20.
At least you fucking OWN the thing, tho
Yet I don't have any of them anymore
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.
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.
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.
CDs were up to $16 when I was making less that $10/hr at work. 😢
Oh I would listen the shit album 100 times and memorize the lyrics for each song. It might have been bad album, but it was mine and I was so excited to bring it home.
But also I was very young
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.
