By steve schwadron

For young music enthusiasts, it is easy to spend hours online checking out bands and albums. Lala, Myspace, Pandora, Last FM, take your pick, they all offer more music than you could ever listen to, right at your fingertips.

I had to spend hours on the phone though. For the same reason, to hear new bands and records. The high-speed Internet boom hadn't emerged, and I was too young to drive to record stores. If I was lucky, I might hear a few new bands on the radio each week, or catch a new MTV Buzz Bin act. That was until 1-800-Music-Now hit the market.

What more could I ask for? An automated music store with samples of every album imaginable. My friends and I were hooked, we would call almost every day. We would listen to every band we were curious about in the BMG Record Club catalog, then listen to the opening acts for every band coming to town. 1-800-Music-Now was an audio encyclopedia of music for us.

I never bought a record from them though, and I don't think many people did, they were gone within a year or so. Recently, it really hit me that they were a little bit ahead of their time. If they started a few years later and sold ringtones and digital files delivered directly to handsets, I think they may have really had chance.

These days, there are a flood of new ideas, and nobody is certain what direction formats and distribution will go. Maybe the answer isn't that far off from where things are now though. 1-800-Music-Now was an attempt at selling music in a new way before it was a necessity, but maybe if they stuck it out the mp3/ringtone revolution would have caught up.