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.
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…..
Then you keep listening to it anyways, and it slowly becomes one of your favourite albums of all time.
We call that justifying your purchase. You forced yourself into liking it so you didn't "waste" the money.
Haha, definitely a possibility!
I think there's also an element of the hit tracks often being a bit more formulaic. There's a big component of familiarity in music that makes it appealing, so people might not appreciate the more experimental tracks on an album until they've heard them a few times.
Nope, not every place had the money to burn on a cd in a jukebox from every artist. Also standing there for 45 minutes to listen to the entire thing? Who actually does that?
Also standing there for 45 minutes to listen to the entire thing? Who actually does that?
Me. It was me. I was 14. I listened to the whole thing. I think the name of the store was "The Warehouse" and maybe another was called "Good Guys"? But yeah. Both. I'd take the bus to the mall and sit on that raggedy ass carpet that smelled like a movie theater floor and listened to the whole damn album. All of them actually (usually like 6-8 per station?) until the manager told me to leave. A couple times clerks would hook me up with burned demos.
But yeah. It was me.
You're not wrong, but there were definitely people who spent tons of time listening to music at the record store.
I guess, I was thinking of strictly purchasing. Yeah some people do just go and hang out and chill instead.
There were actual listening stations with headphones here in Germany at certain media chains. Some people spent whole afternoons in there.
But yeah, the opposite did exist. I remember, when I was a teenager friends got a dozen or more CDs for their birthday. Good old 1998.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Never saw a music shop with a communal CD player that allowed you to remove the CD shrink wrap.
You buy a Sony CD and decide to play it on your computer.
Your computer now has a rootkit installed.
And, when called out, everyone tells you you're a paranoid, tinfoil hat wearing, organ trafficking criminal
That's because you guys throw around the word "rootkit" like my parents call everything "woke" or "communist."
You probably couldn't even define what a rootkit is yet you're scared shitless of a thing you can't properly define.
So yeah, anyone who's afraid of something they don't even understand fully is absolutely paranoid.
Most people are not fully cognizant of the rights they sign away in a click through. There is paranoid and there is prudent.
Read the EULA, if you don't want an anticheat that requires those permissions then don't install the game.
Something having kernel access doesn't make it a rootkit, it makes it high-risk for misuse by a threat actor. Only if the software was exploited by a bad actor to acquire root/hardware permissions would this issue actually become something.
That, or if the anticheat wasn't uninstallable and/or dodged scans intended to locate it, etc.
Putting the responsibility to understand legalese (and advanced concepts like rootkits) to such an extent on the end user is just straight gaslighting. Nobody has the required expertise to determine what an EULA actually says outside of the lawyer who wrote it, and even then, I wouldn't guarantee it.
well the game installs a kernel module without my consent. Isn't that the definition of a rootkit?
Did you install a game with anticheat? Did that anticheat require kernel level access? Can you read?
I'm just curious what part is them sneaking something onto your machine that you're unaware of?
I have no idea if the gamers installing it are "unaware" (I never played such a game), however it's still a shitty practice. The average Joe has no idea what the hell a rootkit is and it's predatory to exploit this. Also, no game should install rootkits. For the love of god, it's a videogame.
No game is installing rootkits, you guys just keep misusing the term, as I've attempted to explain like five fucking times in this thread.
The average joe clearly doesn't understand what a rootkit is, as you've well established.
most anticheats run in the kernel, even the most popular ones like battleye and vanguard.
also they are often installed automatically while launching games for the first time, without any prompts
yeah maybe just design proper authoritative servers instead?
anticheats are kinda a band-aid solution.
"most people who had the rootkit installed on their machine dont know what a rootkit is anyways; why should I care?"
-sony's response
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.
Certainly not singular, but it's very difficult to get away with this undetected because the end user gets physical access to the hardware.
Linux is open source, and they had a malware for 10 years that was undetected.
Having access means nothing if you don’t know what you’re looking for. Rootkits are serious problems.
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.
Yeah I think maybe he meant before 1999. Before Napster(99)/limewire(2000)/morpheus(2001) pirating was bootlegged shit you paid (less) for. But yeah after 99 you got that shit for free on the internet.
Most people were still buying CDs in 99. In ‘99, $10 for an album would have been a pretty sweet price. Tower Records, Best Buy cds were all like $17.99
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
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.
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.
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?
That’s why I always wore my umbro shorts with the inner liner before I went to Walmart
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!
Okay, that's a large collection. I am more interested to buy vinyl these days but they are too expensive here.
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.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I tried to listen the song and it's not really my cup of tea. It felt almost psychedelic.
I for the most cases , don't enjoy any screaming and neither vocals for that matter. That's why I mostly will only listen to instrumental pieces of the metal genre like the doom ost. Nothing else matters is an exception but that song is more of ballad.
Exactly! Compare to Rose for the Dead, which is arguably (ok, my opinion) the most solid "Beauty and the Beast" genre death metal song ever written.
Of course, there ARE vocals, but as I say, totally different genre.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
The part from 1:09 to 1:18 was a pleasant surprise to my ears. The woman seems very talented and I totally understand why you'd feel like a it was a huge waste to fire her.
The start of the instrumental transported my mind into a bandit filled wasteland world. It'd fit soo well into ashe 2063 ( a free doom full conversions game that I highly recommend ) or at least watch a playthrough of. I guarantee you'd play it after watching a few minutes.
If you like that at all, their Aegis album features her much more heavily, if with somewhat less "growl". She also has had a few bands since that did "okay" in Norway. Leaves' Eyes does gothic twist on some traditional celtic.
Also, "Beauty and the Beast" death/doom are hard to find, but Cradle of Filth had a few phenomenal songs of that genre. Nymphetamine Fix is my favorite of theirs. It's so hard to find good death or doom that fit my tastes.
I watched a little LP of ashe 2063. FPS's don't work well with me, but it seemed interesting. Me with gaming seems like you with music :) I don't like "vocals" (action reflex games)
The dude growling voice wasn't that bad the first time he sang. Later parts weren't as good tho. The part at 1:22 till 1:45 was my favorite. Really digging the folklore feel.
I actually have really bad reflexes but most games allow to toggle the difficulty and juste enjoy the story with the exploration as the reward, not passing the challenges. I wish it was as easy to toggle the vocals off. So many songs I deeply enjoyed until someone sang and removed any joy listening to it, so i end up playing that first part over and over.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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.
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.
Yeah, I only had a handful of CDs because they were too expensive! I jumped on the napster train and got a CD burner as soon as I could.
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.
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.
Okay, but they give you DRM free downloads. If EPIC kills them, you still own every album as long as you download it. I'll be sad if Bandcamp dies, but I can still play all music I got from it. That's the way it should be.
Oh I am doing just that, it is going to be a pain in the ass, but I am going to download the full library in FLAC format. And it not Epic anymore is Songster or something like that.
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.
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.
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.
I bought 3 Monster Magnet albums for Sugar Ray's Mean Machine....on the plus side FUCKING Monster Magnet led me to The Atomic Bitchwax, Nebula, Kyuss, Low Rider, Fu Manchu, Orange Goblin, Dozer, Spiritual Beggars and more Stoner fun.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I just got to college in 2000 and had highspeed Napster. From there I found some sketch Russian site I could get music from for a few years in the early 2000s but there was also a huge used CD store in my college town with reasonable prices I used to frequent. Now days if I want to find a bunch of new music I dont know, Usenet for the win. But honestly most of the stuff I like is on bandcamp usually and I will go buy the bands I find on use net. My best discovery has been Brant Bjork (he played drums in Kyuss but makes chill ass rock) and PallBearer and Arkansas doom band that is pretty great. I have since purchased their catalogue on Vinyl, mostly on band camp because it is hard to find in stores.
In the 2000s i was always looking for music and found a Forum from Ukraine called FunkySouls that covered all new releases and was active until a few days after Russia invaded. There were some threads with excellent taste and i really miss those guys.
Cuntroll from Russia also has some good artists.
After i found that Moon Wiring Club was on Bandcamp, i took a look around and found a lot of good music. When i buy something, it's usually from Bandcamp.
I saw Kyuss live a loong time ago, thanks for the tip. This made me think of Boris' new EP "me when the when i". They were always a tad too experimental for me to keep them on repeat. Their newest album though, is a very very smooth release - chill ass rock describes it perfectly.
I also stumbled on the label subsist on Bandcamp some time ago and have gotten almost all releases and eagerly waiting for new releases. Excellent raw electronics.
Oh, they weren't mp3 files. Iirc it was stuff like darude-sandstorm-live-mp3.exe or eminem-without-me-mp3.exe.
It wasn't Napster's fault, ISDN at the time was what most people had. 1 internet + 1 phone line. You got online with max 68 Kbps. Bundling both lines got you 128 Kbps, then the phone line would be obviously busy giving you more speed, rendering the phone unusable.
Those were fun times in households with more than 1 member.