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.
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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A lot of people still bought whole cd's because it had that one song from the radio on it.
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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
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yeah maybe just design proper authoritative servers instead?
anticheats are kinda a band-aid solution.
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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.
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"
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.
I buy all my music on Bandcamp.
How much have you spent on buying albums in Bandcamp? It must be a lot if Bandcamp is the your only choice for listening to music.
I have 170 albums in my Bandcamp collection. I have a lot more on my mp3 collection which I have bought via other means. Each album is maybe $10 on average, so that is around $1700. I have used Bandcamp for around 8 years after 7digital closed their EU store and eMusic became trash. So that's around $17 per month. Not a lot of money in my book, music means a lot to me!
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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.
That's how I bought the Hybrid Theory album from Linkin Park. Took a chance, knew nothing about them.
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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.
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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.
Then you realize you aren't paying $20 a month, and you buy a new album, that you fucking OWN forever.
$20 CAD gets you a family plan that you can share up to 5 people, so $4 CAD each.
Not sure what you're on about. If you're paying $20 for Spotify you're getting ripped off.
Or you can pay $25 CAD for YouTube Premium, share it with 5 people, and get both YouTube ad free AND YouTube Music for $5 CAD per month.
I'd rather pay $4/$5 per month to access millions of songs than $20 for an album that I will get bored of in a few months, thanks.
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.
$10 would get a you a CD where the 3rd track is also the last.
Yup. I seem to remember most mainstream albums were around $15-20 in the 1990s. Adjusted for inflation, that'd be about $28-37 today.
At least you fucking OWN the thing, tho
Yet I don't have any of them anymore
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
Spotify maybe, I've never used it. And Google Play music used to be the best for this, but YouTube music has me stuck in a loop of my last 10 or 20 songs and I hate it.
If I'm listening to some techno, and I change gears to old school country/bluegrass for awhile, then, YouTube will never ever recommend techno to me again. Not unless I manually remember some of my favorite songs, search for them, and retrain it that I like techno. But then of course country slowly dies. God forbid I mix in hard rock, punk rock, or rap. It just confuses it more.
And it's not just a genre problem, even within a genre of repeats the same dozen or two songs every time I open the app.
It's not just me, I have a family plan and my brothers have both separately complained to me about the algorithms being worse than Google Play music, which is what we used to use.
I literally created a playlist called YouTube music sucks, where I save my most liked songs, so I can reseed the algorithm when I want a change of tunes. I need the playlist because I have a terrible memory and can't remember all the songs I've liked.
Why don't I change? Because I'm cheap, and it's bundled with YouTube premium for the whole family. And it has no right to be as bad as it is. I keep thinking they're gonna fix it, but I guess maybe people like being spoon fed their last 20 liked songs?
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I pirated all mine.
Me too. That is when I discovered the rarest Nirvana song of all time. It was Freak by Silverchair. It took me an hour to download it.
I also had the entire collection of songs Bill Clinton sang about blowjobs and Monica Lewinsky. Like, literally that’s all the dude sang about. Talk about being obsessed.
I could go on. What a great time it was to be alive.
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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.
Bandcamp just laid off a ton of people....from Bandcamp fan with 1500+ albums. I've definitely paid back my napster shenanigans.
You were done after napster?
I mean, it really only started to take off with eDonkey. napster was still very slow and so much malware disguised as mp3 files.
You didn't even have to think about storage solutions. Even if i had my ISDN Connection bundled ( no phone line free for calls then ), the speed was max 128 Kbps.
Sorry, i suddenly remembered these details, from a long long time ago.
50% were laid off. This after Songtradr had commited to keep the Bandcamp experience the same.
The union was for nothing. Epic just sold, before any agreement wss made and again a few made a lot, while employees must endure whatever comes.
This fucking sucks big time.
The Internet as we knew it, is fading away and we just can hope that our privacy and an open internet are not only things we remember fondly, in a few years.
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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.
Death metal
wait until the guy sings
(｡╯︵╰｡)
MFW the main singer guttural scream isn't as good as in the last album.
/jk
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$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. 😢
It was like that though.
It's 1999. Why are you paying for music at all? Napster still exists for you.
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