[sanskritabelt]

Yeah, I remember those times, and I hated them, because sometimes you got a shitty album and you were stuck with it. You go to the record store and there are these long ass shelves just full of stuff that may be good or may be shitty and you're never gonna know.

[ssharp]

Growing up in the mid/late 90's (HS class of '99) and without high-speed service, I think I had an interesting hybrid experience. Napster wasn't around yet, but you could still get music from other sources like various FTP sites that you could discover or IRC channels.

Using dial-up services for whole albums was time consuming but downloading individual songs wasn't too bad. So I could download one or two songs from an artist I wasn't that familiar with and if I liked the songs, I might go to the store, or CDNow :), to buy a CD.

So you could access a lot of music to sample but still only ended up with a few albums to actually listen to.

I recall growing up listening to certain albums countless times. I'm not sure if I'd still do that today. Some songs require a few listens before they really click with you, and services like Spotify don't have the limits that the old models did.

While it may be nice nostalgia to look back at how I listened to and acquired music growing up, if you could have given 16 year-old me today's Spotify, I would have taken it in a heartbeat.