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Comment by scop | Hacker News Reader

I was listening to James Hetfield on the Joe Rogan Experience a few months back and he highlighted an experienced I completely forgot existed: buying albums solely based on album art.

I remember as a kid walking through the aisles of albums, floating around certain genres, and deciding on what to purchase purely because of an album cover. Band I had never heard of, well, look at that cover!

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I might do this for the $1 vinyl/CD rack, but never in general. CDs were crazy expensive. We're talking $17.99 in the year 2000 and maybe $9.99 for the cassette.

I don't many kids that had money to drop on something based on the art alone. We needed money for magazines and concerts too y'know.

Good point. I didn't have that kind of money simply laying around, but I would sometimes save up and pay the $17.99. With that level of risk there was that much more reward, almost a form of gambling. It probably made my young brain give each song a lot more attention than I would have otherwise as I had to make sure I got my investment "back".

That is true. When I bought an album, I listened to it front and back. Gave several chances to songs that didn't connect with me the first time. Even though that was 20 years ago, I still remember the mediocre songs better than I remember some songs from the recent past that I actually liked.

I don't remember even buying cds because they were so absurdly expensive. Everyone I knew just had a binder full of burned cds, including my parents.

I still do this on Spotify. Scroll through the new releases and if a cover looks interesting, I give it a listen. Having grown up in record stores, I love that I can listen to anything instantly. It's pretty insane actually.

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