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.
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…
I still keep a pencil in my car. I know there’s no cassette to play, but my car feels naked with a pencil rolling around the center console or in the little tray on the dash.
I also learned how to do this as a child but I am probably a bit younger than you at 18yo.
“Old or poor…”
It was less that we were poor and more that my parents had a lot of music and radio dramas on different media. My father still has more than two hundred vinyl disks that he plays semiregularly and I have an old audio tape player/recorder sitting around in my bedroom although I don’t really use that one.
Just having a joke, glad to hear people committed to the old media
Kazaa, limewire. One - Metallica.mp3.exe as far as the eye can see.
That file was the best. I could have made a collection out of them xD
Format C:, Reinstall XP
In 1999? Uuuuh.
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
yeah maybe just design proper authoritative servers instead?
anticheats are kinda a band-aid solution.
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”
I kinda love this journey though
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.
Like buying a game CD and a warez copy bypass and the crew doing an ASCII art walk through, bought for $5 from a classmate
Or shareware floppy disks with copyright bypass
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.
At least later on a lot of shops had these listening stations.
That’s why I always wore my umbro shorts with the inner liner before I went to Walmart
For real… I never had this problem before… Currently I’m a proud Spotify user.
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 album showed me how to live.
Technically the one I bought on a whim back then was Out of Exile, which I would now consider the weakest of the three, but I liked it enough to seek out more.
That’s how I bought the Hybrid Theory album from Linkin Park. Took a chance, knew nothing about them.
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.
Napster was 99
I was talking those CDs from the library and loading them onto my Rio PMP
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.
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.
At least you fucking OWN the thing, tho
It‘s 2023, you can still listen to the same shitty music, because it is yours to keep.
$10 would get a you a CD where the 3rd track is also the last.
$10 for an album? You lucky dog, here one album CD costs at that time around $25.
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.
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
With a new band you never know. It could be a low, murky graaar like Immolation or Bolt Thrower… or a higher pitch like most Entombed (I prefer Clandestine where some bassist from another band sang, but most people don’t, for some reason). Or it could be like Deicide where the singer is mainly good then they cheapen it with this cheesy high pitched thing…. Carcass where the singer is h medium pitched and sounds good, then they also have a low guttural voice thrown in here and there, which was alright. Or maybe all is well and it’s the perfect Morbid Angel vocals.
I pirated all mine.