this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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No wonder piracy was so popular
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
Fair most CD’s I bought were like $13 I didn’t go to tower or best buy cuz nah
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.
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
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?
At least later on a lot of shops had these listening stations.
That’s why I always wore my umbro shorts with the inner liner before I went to Walmart
For real... I never had this problem before... Currently I'm a proud Spotify user.