Now I will tell you how we bought music in the 1990s.

To hear music before you bought it, either a friend would play it for you or you'd hear it on the radio.

But there was a third way! You'd go to a music store. Most music stores had a CD player with some headphones set up.

You'd go to the front counter with the CD you were interested in, and an employee would carefully unhinge the CD case — so as not to tear the security strip sealing the case — and put the CD into the CD player. You'd put on the headphones and stand there, listening to the album.

If you liked it, great, you could buy it. If you didn't like it, you could put it back. At smaller music shops (like Spencer's, here in Charlottesville), the shopkeeper would just play the CD over the stereo for you.

I usually bought used CDs. Those were $5–$8 instead of $12–15. Then it was important to open the (unsealed) case and inspect the CD, to make sure it wasn't scratched, and maybe skim through the tracks on the CD player to make sure it didn't skip.

If there was just one song you wanted? Didn't matter, had to buy the whole CD.

This was how I came to buy the only album that I ever sold back to the store (to be resold as a used album): Blues Traveler's "Four." "Run-Around" was fine, but the rest of it was horrific.

And that is how we bought music in the 1990s.