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CDNow was amazing before Amazon bought and killed them. Their recommendations were great and turned me on to artists I wouldn't have ever thought about otherwi

CDNow was amazing before Amazon bought and killed them. Their recommendations were great and turned me on to artists I wouldn't have ever thought about otherwise. For discoverability these days? Radio, mostly college radio. Much of it is streamed over teh intertubes. KXSF (ex-USF), KEXP (UW), KALX (Cal). Of course there's internet only stuff like SOMAFM or Midlands Metalheads. And there are aggregators like Sound Garden. But I've never once felt that Spotify was something missing from my life. KEXP deserves a special shoutout because they put a lot of their sessions on Youtube and have an excellent production crew.

vibrio 3y ago
Wow. I hadn’t thought about CDNow in a long time. I spent a lot of my teen years (80’s) flipping stacks in record stores looking for obscure music. I discovered CDnow in 1995ish on Telnet and their selection blew my mind. I feel like using my credit card with them via command line interface on a dark scree was maybe the riskiest financialI thing I’ve ever done —but it worked well and I got some CDs i thought I’d never find . Great dusty memory.
disqard 3y ago
Yes, KEXP is great! I regularly discover new artists there.
ssl-3 3y ago
CDNow had more in their catalog than the huge onion-skin book that the local independent music store had. They were selling things online very, very early -- it seems like they were doing that an eternity before "e-commerce" became a part of the vernacular. In the days before Sir Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web became common, I used to browse CDNow using telnet from a borrowed dialup account on a university VAX system, with a terminal emulator running on MS-DOS. Fun stuff. (I never bought anything from CDNow -- I used it as a service to find the catalog numbers of the CDs I wanted to buy, which I'd then order from the local shop downtown.)
- inferiorhuman 3y ago
  That's the youngest I've felt in quite a while – I've only used CDNow's web interface. For me it was the recommendations (and search that simply worked unlike Amazon).

vibrio 3y ago

Wow. I hadn’t thought about CDNow in a long time. I spent a lot of my teen years (80’s) flipping stacks in record stores looking for obscure music. I discovered CDnow in 1995ish on Telnet and their selection blew my mind. I feel like using my credit card with them via command line interface on a dark scree was maybe the riskiest financialI thing I’ve ever done —but it worked well and I got some CDs i thought I’d never find . Great dusty memory.

disqard 3y ago

Yes, KEXP is great! I regularly discover new artists there.

ssl-3 3y ago

CDNow had more in their catalog than the huge onion-skin book that the local independent music store had. They were selling things online very, very early -- it seems like they were doing that an eternity before "e-commerce" became a part of the vernacular. In the days before Sir Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web became common, I used to browse CDNow using telnet from a borrowed dialup account on a university VAX system, with a terminal emulator running on MS-DOS. Fun stuff. (I never bought anything from CDNow -- I used it as a service to find the catalog numbers of the CDs I wanted to buy, which I'd then order from the local shop downtown.)

inferiorhuman 3y ago
That's the youngest I've felt in quite a while – I've only used CDNow's web interface. For me it was the recommendations (and search that simply worked unlike Amazon).