Anyone else remember the mail order CD services like Columbia house and bmg? I probably still owe them like a grand lmao.
I signed up for some BMG deal where you get 12 CDs if you buy one. They sent me the one but I never paid them (I was 9). They sent my family a letter demanding money but we never paid. Suckers!
Oh no! A band made some money!
FUCK SPOTIFY.
Listening stations were LIFE!!!
I don’t miss the times when I had to use my headphones as an antena for radio, as I couldn’t buy music.
Back when i had an xperia phone it actually was able to pick up radio with headphones connected, had an app for it
I had a pair of headphones with an actual built-in radio. I thought I was hot shit. It was the mid-90s and I was probably 10-ish.
Were they also yellow like mine?
Nah, classic late 90s metallic silver.
For sure, Spotify is convenient but you own nothing and you locked with a subscription. Also, you listen what they propose. What happens if your favorite band become removed from their library?
I still buy few albums and keep my library of audio files. (And I get some album for free using the same methods we used back in the days 😏)
You own nothing and you locked with a subscription
Who cares if I only pay 10€ a month but can access 80 million songs. Back then 10€ bought you 75% of an album and you were forced to listen to it until you started hating it.
You listen what they propose
First of this is not necessary a bad thing. The algorithm can propose music you like not music that’s popular. You have to train it by making your own choices which - SUPRISE - is also what we did back than. People were influenced by MTV but at the end it was your decision what you listen to just like these days. You literally only have to enter the name of any album into the search bar. Back then the retailer did the preselection for you and only put CDs on display that would sell.
What happens when you favorite band gets removed from their library
Rarely happens because these days when you as an artist are not on the streaming services you might as well not exist at all.
The way you access music just isn’t comfortable to most people including me.
The only songs that have ever been removed from my library (Spotify shows you) are remixes/mashups where the person doing it never had permission.
Not really sure what you mean by you listen to what they propose? You search what you want, follow other people, listen to playlists you or other people have made.
I mean they could have some arrists they don’t want to be on spotify. It already happened.
Don’t think that list is totally accurate. Listening to Norwegian Wood as I type this.
My music taste is always changing. I like listening to new (to me) music, not the same albums over and over. I much prefer spotify over buying albums
You can still buy music digitally these days
There are ways to enjoy most of Spotifys ‘Premium Features’ withiut paying. And for the Artist I like I buy a physical copy, because I like having something to put in my shelf. Also it helps the Artists more than listening on Spotify
As a kid in the 2000s I got the yearly now that’s what I call music album then listened to those 16-18 songs for the rest of the year or the radio. Until limewire.
Nah, at that time AudioGalaxy was in full spring and I was rocking the MZ-R30 Minidisc walkman.
Audiogalaxy was amazing. I found so much good music through it that totally influenced my taste for the rest of my life. Soulseek, OiNK, What.CD and Waffles led the way after that. Now it’s Redacted and Orpheus. It’s been a journey!
This is why stores would let you listen to it before purchasing
I remembered I had a friend who couldn’t have any albums with swearing and I’d read the lyrics insert for him to check for swearing while he listed to a few tracks
Yea I remember when people would just stand around the headphone booths in music stores and sample whatever new CDs came out that week. Maybe it was worse in the cassette tape era?
The headphones were gross. And to be honest, most albums only have a couple good songs anyway.
It was always like that, wasnt it? Albums would have that one headline track that everyone wanted and then 7 bullshit tracks and one or two tracks that kinda sounded like the good track, as if they were the discarded parts that they decided to cut and stitch into a song to fill up the cd.
And that’s why there were secondhand CD shops.
And thats why we still had cassette decks that could record from CDs you borrowed from your buddies/public library.
I remember getting an early CD burner in 1998 for like $350 it was awesome
Wasn’t 1999 the peak of the price gouging from the record labels? It was like $20-25 for a new album for a ton of the major record labels from what I remember.
My budget for CDs maxed out at $16. After that, I had to moved to Napster.
I’m pretty sure I owe my career in computers to the high seas. Napster led to irc, which led to the endless rabbit hole of many a sleepless night in the chat rooms of the 90s.
Yes, albums weren’t $10, even on small labels. We were dropping $20+ hoping for the best. In some cases convincing ourselves it was good, just because we spent so much on it.
$10? That’s a steal.
One of the last times I just straight up bought a full CD was 1999
Mr Bungle. California. $18
Still one of the best purchases ever, though
I think streaming makes music a “throwaway” product.
I well and fondly remember when a new album of my favorite band came out and I met friends at the music store to listen and buy it from my saved pocket money. And I still habe most of these albums… and I still listen to them… all though they live on my music players hdd permanently
Streaming allowed me to discover 1700 songs that I love. It gave me the opportunity to enjoy countless genres. Now I export my liked songs to a spreadsheet so I never lose them. I wouldn’t be able to do that otherwise. It’s done great things for my music listening.
what.cd’s (RIP) big music spider tree was that for me. Artist I like? At the the bottom of the page, a buncha of others like them.
I really don’t miss the days when we paid more money for a significantly more inconvenient way of listening to SIGNIFICANTLY less diverse music on much shittier devices.
I absolutely agree. I quit the streaming services and now put the money towards purchasing media I actually care about.
There’s still good stuff out there. You just have to dig deeper, take risks, and you have to make the conscious decision to give it an active listen from front to back.
Music streaming is just … Objectively better for everybody. Small bands can be heard, hence the indy scene booming so hard, consumers can access their content anywhere there’s internet.
I think you miss the ritual around getting physical media and having a session where you just sit back and listen to the album for the first time. You could try to replicate it, but I think child-like wonder was the main ingredient ;)
Growing up in the early 2000s I always borrowed CDs from the library and learned how to burn them on my own CDs.
I had a friend with a CD player/tape player boombox and rich parents, he would copy the CDs to tapes so I could listen to them.
Only for a little while though, it wouldn’t be long after when we were making our own playlists and burning them to cd.
I was buying vinyl in '99 and still buying vinyl today.
1999 CDs were typically $20 - $30 so it was actually worse. This was what you would pay at a Sam Goody, Camelot Music, FYE etc.
It wasn’t until a few years later that CD prices were cheaper. You could go to Wal-Mart and get cheaper prices, but you would be buying censored or edited albums.
I remember the Wal-Mart release of Eminem’s second album was missing the entire song of Kim for example, just completely replaced.
I think a lot of people who post about the nineties weren’t spending their own money or something, because I remember how pricey music was, and cherished each CD.
I still have some of my CDs from the nineties.
No the average price of CDs in the 90s was about $15 and they were on sale regularly for $10-12 in some places.
I bought about 400 CDs in the 90s and still have them.
Cool, but definitely not my experience growing up. You could get those prices sometimes at Wal-Mart but CDa would be edited or censored, and I grew up in an area where there were no standalone CD or Record stores, so all I saw and had access to was mall stores like Camelot Music, FYE, or Sam Goody.
The prices I’m referencing were 100% accurate for my time of reference, which was the bulk of the nineties.
Only towards the end, like literal turn of the century late 1999 into 2000 did things actually start to change.
I promise this is true.
Yeah you can’t really censor Kim lol. At least it was replaced with a new song (a South-Park-parody drug-PSA for kids) and not something from the first album.
I used a cassette player until 2002!
