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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.