There were some paid music by phone services in the early ‘90s, too, when 1-900 services were popular. The idea was you could read a review of new music in, say

There were some paid music by phone services in the early ‘90s, too, when 1-900 services were popular. The idea was you could read a review of new music in, say, Spin and call to listen to it for a small fee, presumably before you went to the record store or ordered it by mail. The services themselves were automated but I believe humans had to do a fair amount of work to get physical CDs and load the sample tracks onto the servers.