Memes

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

More like $20.

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.

You listen to it anyway and it grows on you.

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.

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.

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

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

At least you fucking OWN the thing, tho

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.

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.

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.

I pirated all mine.

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

napster :)

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

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

Yes, there are exceptions, we now call them classics

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