You were probably deciding what CDs or tapes or records to buy, with whatever cut of your allowance or your paycheck you cared to spend on such things, based on what you heard on FM radio. Or maybe what you read about in Spin, or The Source, or your local alt-weekly, or underground zines that somebody stapled together at Kinko’s (remember Kinko’s?). Maybe your friends turned you on to new music with handmade mixtapes, on gray blank Maxell cassettes. Maybe you’d begun exploring the world of newsgroups, message boards, and e-mail listservs.