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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.
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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 the CD because they had a charting single on radio, you’re than disappointed that the rest of the album is a different sound.
Not everyone had internet in the 90s-00s either mate…..
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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.
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I'm old enough to know the pencil trick to fix a cassette that got eaten by the stereo....
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Also 1999 already had Napster
Only half of it, apparently! I just looked it up to check, and it turns out it launched on June 1 of that year.
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God, I miss test listens. My favorite record store was very easy going in this, they'd happily let me stand there listening to most of the CD. The unspoken rule was that if you spend that much time listening, you're going to buy it anyway.
One of the few shops where I always felt welcome. -
Never saw a music shop with a communal CD player that allowed you to remove the CD shrink wrap.
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You buy a Sony CD and decide to play it on your computer.
Your computer now has a rootkit installed.
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And these days people just install the rootkit, only it's allegedly to prevent game cheating.
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"most people who had the rootkit installed on their machine dont know what a rootkit is anyways; why should I care?"
-sony's response
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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"
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No wonder piracy was so popular
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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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When I was a kid we still recorded stuff off the radio and copied our zx spectrum games on the family hi-fi. I'd say good times but it's so much better now I can pirate everything in great quality from teh interwebs.
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My memory is a little fuzzy with dates but I'm pretty sure Napster was going full steam by '99 but even before that we used to trade mp3 files on mIRC or ICQ+CuteFTP, I had hundreds of albums I never paid for which I am still amazed I managed to do over a shared 56k connection
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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
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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.
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At least later on a lot of shops had these listening stations.
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Man came here to say this... Hell I was in a class action lawsuit in the early 2000s because of CD pricing. https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/cd-price-fixing-suit-settled-for-143-million-74008/
Shit was super expensive back in the day.
But as weird Al says... How else is he going to get a diamond encrusted swimming pool?
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That’s why I always wore my umbro shorts with the inner liner before I went to Walmart
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For real... I never had this problem before... Currently I'm a proud Spotify user.
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You listen to it anyway and it grows on you.
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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.
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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.
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That album showed me how to live.
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But it didn't give you life... Wait, did it?
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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.
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That's how I bought the Hybrid Theory album from Linkin Park. Took a chance, knew nothing about them.
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This was LD50 for me
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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.
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Yeah, I like how this is pretending that the internet didn't exist in 1999 because there was no Spotify or iTunes.
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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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There was also a market for used CDs back in the day so you could sell it and buy another
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The still a few stores around here in Portland trading CDs and vinyl
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Still is!
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I used to go to Tower Records to listen to albums. Never bought a single cd.
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Napster was 99
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I was talking those CDs from the library and loading them onto my Rio PMP
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Then you realize you aren't paying $20 a month, and you buy a new album, that you fucking OWN forever.
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$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.
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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.
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$10 would get a you a CD where the 3rd track is also the last.
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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.
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At least you fucking OWN the thing, tho
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Yet I don't have any of them anymore
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I guess they're in a closet.... Deep in the back.
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1999?
Try $20.
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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.
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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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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.
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Sounds like a Theatre of Tragedy problem.
"Fuck that shit. We'll fire the singer that put us on the map because she was only supposed to be a back-up, and then we'll go full techno".
(as you may guess, I never got over it. Also, I know this full-techno song was still w/ Liv Kristine, but they stayed techno-ey and I picked a song I don't actually hate)
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Fucking Death metal was my counter to shitty alternative albums with one hit...30 years later I'm still a fan of grindcore/death metal/stoner metal.....thank god for Relapse Records.
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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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Bandcamp just got purchased by a shit head company and is laying off staff....I've got 1500+ albums on bandcamp it's fucking great and about to be fucked.
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Where the hell you buying CDs for $10 in 1999?
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The standard price where I grew up was $13. Feels like a steal these days.
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I don't think any CD I ever wanted enough to buy was less than $16. My family was poor so cassette tapes were still a thing for quite a while.
By the time I could start thinking about affording CDs, I'd already seen the movie Hackers (1994) and was convinced everything would be digital really fucking fast.
I started converting my CDs in the Napster era.
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CD Depot.
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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.
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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.
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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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Spotify is really good with recommendations. I think they use different algorithms for the different personal playlists: the Release Radar seems to use my followed artists and all my playlists, while Discover Weekly uses my recent listening history.
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I pirated all mine.
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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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I bought 3 Monster Magnet albums for Sugar Ray's Mean Machine....on the plus side FUCKING Monster Magnet led me to The Atomic removedwax, Nebula, Kyuss, Low Rider, Fu Manchu, Orange Goblin, Dozer, Spiritual Beggars and more Stoner fun.
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I dubbed mix tapes off the radio in the early 90s and got into burning CDs in the late 90s. I was a cheap ass pirate even back in the day. Also ripped a LOT of my friends CDs to cassette tape. My dad used to buy packs wholesale.
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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.
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Bandcamp just laid off a ton of people....from Bandcamp fan with 1500+ albums. I've definitely paid back my napster shenanigans.
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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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$10 for an album? You lucky dog, here one album CD costs at that time around $25.
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It‘s 2023, you can still listen to the same shitty music, because it is yours to keep.
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I'm assuming you're saying still listen to the same shit music you BOUGHT back then?
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Yes, the comment was meant as criticism of the streaming era packaged as a joke
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The sad truth. I threw out my CD binders at least 10 years ago. I still have some of that uploaded to the cloud, but I've swapped provider a few times and probably lost some.
And more often, I Just listen on spotify or youtube music.
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napster :)
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napster baaaad
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Yeah. If we are talking 99-2001ish Napster was king.
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CDs were up to $16 when I was making less that $10/hr at work. 😢
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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.
But also I was very young
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So you too owned Limp Bizkit albums
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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.
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It's 1999. Why are you paying for music at all? Napster still exists for you.
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Only about 4% of the worlds population had internet access in 1999.
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Yeah and good luck with the 500mb montly cap!!
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And the internet was so much better then...the masses of people ruined it
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Alternate take - spend 3 minutes downloading a 3 minute song. Buy the album. The rest of the album blows. You just worked for two hours to pay for it in your minimum wage after school casual job
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If you got 3 tracks off a hip hop album you’d nailed it.
Yes, there are exceptions, we now call them classics
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It was like that though.
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I bought Finger11 for paralyzed and then realized it was by far their best track.
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What? That's their sell-out pop song. The rest of their stuff is way better.
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Back in those days you could listen to the record/cassette/cd in the store before you bought it. They would have these headphones you could use.
So it's not as big of a problem as this meme would make it seem.
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The music shop at the mall near me had those headphones but only like 10 albums that were able to demo. And I'm pretty sure the demo was just bits of the songs. I definitely bought plenty of CDs having heard only one track or fewer.
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Oh, that sucks. Mine had like some headphones at the counter with a few buttons in the counter itself. And you would just hand the person behind the counter the cd you wanted to listen to and they'd put it in.
But from what I saw on old footage was they just had a line of a few turntables with headphones and you could just listen to the records.
This may have been the mom and pop shops and not the chain shops. Though I don't know about that.
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But you owned it. So you could sell the CD and recoup almost all of your money.
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Not sure who you were selling your CDs too to get almost all your money back. Maybe if you sold it to a friend.
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A used music store or pawn shop
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Except you couldn't? You would get $1-2 bucks for most used tapes/LPs/Cds.
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Maybe if you tried to sell at FYE. But a local flea market? You could totally get $10-$15 depending on what it was and how much it cost initially.
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The person who made this meme is too young to know about reselling stuff they own.
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Napster was reparations for Soul Asylums Strangers With Candy album.
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For me, it's every Metallica album after Justice For All, and Lars Ulrich can definitely fuck off.
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When people who didn't like rock/metal bought an Extreme album because they thought all the songs were like More Than Words.
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I'll never forget walking into a record store, looking at a cannibal corpse album. The guy working there looked at me and said if i want the album for free. I was a teen with like 9 dollars to my name so i said of course, thank you. When i asked why he said: because it FUCKING SUCKS.
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Fuck off...Butchered at Birth fixed all the shitty alternative albums with one hit. Fuck off Letters to Cleo
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While the shred guitar nerds were wondering what the fuck Nuno Bettancourt was playing with that track.
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Try $20 of disappointing CD.
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Somebody bought the Chris Gaines album.
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I remember seeing that on a magazine cover and thinking it was bullshit
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Worse: you're a DJ in 1998 and spend $12 for a 6 minute B-side.
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That's why I only buy albums that I listened to before on Spotify.
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just be a Pirate, and support your fav artist if you enjoy their work
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Someone explain this format to me, please. Why is one weird highlighted?
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It feels like a result of someone reposting/screencapping and censoring the f-word, then a reposter trying to put it back
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If it happened to you in 1999 then you are just probably dumb as fuck because plenty of available information across the nation (~$16-18)
If it happened in 1992, you would be big sad and harder to find out more info pre-buy ($10-12)
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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.
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I can hear the machine gun kick drums from here
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Bought reanimation by Linkin park. The mecha album art is better than the remixes imo. Also the larger reason I bought it lol.
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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.
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Lincoln Park_Last Resort.mp3
drdre_ginandjuice.wma
Brittanyspearsboobs.exe
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Couldn't you just get it back to the store and get a refund?
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it probably would be worse if you bought it in the most expensive format
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I had a cd burner since 93 when I was in 8th grade. We used to just copy each other's cds.
