I just realized that I discovered game music CDs 10 years ago. A little more than 10 years ago, because it happened during the summer of 1999. Some random facts I can recall:

-Cloud's Villa offered single mp3 files to download and they were not fast downloads.

-It was not uncommon to see Dracula ~New Classic~ sell for more than $1000.

-the-place.com was The Place to go for game music. I didn't initially place any online orders with them, though. I wasn't sure how to do that, so I called them. The same guy always picked up the phone and found me MIDI Power Pro5 and Salamander Pro Fusion factory sealed. Most of the stuff I asked for he never found. I later learned how to place online orders and found Zuntata Live 1997 factory sealed for $10; that was my first exposure to Zuntata music. I paid the $10 plus shipping by sending a money order (I didn't have a credit card yet.)

-I joined ebay because of video game music and chose the ID furgan, because I liked the evil Ambassador Furgan from the Star Wars novels. I later found the equivalent of cursing in the Star Wars novels - "Emperor's Black Bones!". I thought that was really amusing, so I changed my ebay ID to emperorsblackbones. In early 2000, a factory sealed Dracula ~New Classic~ was going for $4,555. My first actual game music purchase on ebay was Final Fantasy III - Legend of the Eternal Wind. It was published by Ever Anime and I had no idea it was a bootleg.

-I started using email because of video game music. I needed a way to communicate with the sellers on ebay.

-Few people were clear as to the quality of CDR copies. I was not certain if they were the same as the original and some people even distinguished 1st generation copies from 2nd generation copies. I later learned that a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy...ad infinitum was still nearly identical.

-4X CD Burners were fast.

-I wasn't so lucky. I had a 2X CD burner.

-I was made aware of video game music from an ad in Electronic Gaming Monthly. A store called Game Cave was advertising Ocarina of Time: Hyrule Symphony. I called them on the phone and I asked why the Ever Anime version was cheaper. The sales rep wouldn't tell me why, but rather told me to always buy Ever Anime versions. I found his advice to be very good because they were $10 cheaper.

-I ordered Konami Shooting Battle II (factory sealed) from Gamemusic.com. They also still had Battle the Best (sealed) in stock for a good amount of time.

-Backtrip Records had MIDI Power Pro3 ~ Policenauts still in stock (factory sealed).

-I ordered 50 CDR copies from Cloud's Villa in the summer of 2000, from Cloud himself. It took him more than a month to make them and his CD burner broke in the process (he had to send it in for repairs). I ordered them because I mostly wanted to hear FALCOM music, of which he had a lot. I wasn't so interested in buying originals of Falcom music, because I didn't know a damn thing about it. But the Konami CDs, I went for those originals.

-When I discovered CDJapan, just about every Squaresoft (yes - Squaresoft) album was still in stock, along with Live A Live, Super Mario RPG, and Bahamut Lagoon. I had noticed that people were paying more than $100 for the Super Mario RPG OST on ebay, so I ordered one sealed and got $150 for it.

-The first ID I can recall using here before I settled on Jodo Kast was Gantoris, a dark Jedi.

10 or 11 years ago I started using Internet and it was the very beginning of my authentic VGM hobby. I was informed a great amount and myself did a vast survey. I think that's one of the most interesting eras of VGM. Astoundingly, some of the website I frequented still survive. I also illegally downloaded, nah, sampled lots of the soundtracks I didn't know, that also helped me expand my tastes.

I remember Cloud's Villa, discovering the mysteries of FTPs, checking out a fake FFIX battle theme, hearing sample music from Legend of Mana.

all things considered, I'd say  VGM has fared much better since then than I have.

Nothing has changed, since both discovering and getting VGM cds are basically entirely dependent upon the Internet and e-commerce for it's transport.

That was true both a decade ago and still today.

Ten years. We're getting old. As far as I remember it was that year I found this place, looking to find out if a VGM cd I had bought was a bootleg (it was). I found better places to buy reading the boards and started posting soon after.

Can it really be ten years? Have I got that right?

It was actually about 12 years ago that I first discovered all the OSTs and arranged albums they released in Japan. That's when the first Mp3 sites were coming out, and I remember taking forever to DL the entire FFVII OSt in good old 128kps, on a 56k modem connection in a dorm. I a couple times opened the DL window and went to class....

It wasn't until a year and a half later that I decided to actually BUY CDs. I actually learned about boots almost right away after I started DLing, so had already been quite knowledgeable about where to buy, etc.

Back then, Tokyopop was an import retailer, and they actually did something illegal -- they charged you more automatically if their price changed by the time they could get the CD. It was still often the cheapest place, though.

I remember Cloud's Villa, but I also used Falchion's VGM server. It used some sort of archaic proprietary client/server software I can't recall the name of, instead of FTP.

Ten years ago, I was reading an issue of Gamefan, seen an ad for Gamecave that had all sorts of cool shit for sale. Evangelion and Gundam model kits, video game and anime soundtracks, "wallscrolls" for anime, all sorts of shit. I remember seeing the demonic looking Evangelion kits from Bandai, thought they were, like, the antagonists from whatever show they were from, and not being able to distinguish several of the Gundams from each other. Shit was SO cash.

In 2001, I picked up the Xenogears OST from a shop in Chinatown. I paid $40 for it, and predictably, it was a bootleg (which I didn't know at the time). I remember disliking the music until I forced myself through the entire soundtrack, at which point it grew on me until I found myself falling asleep to it. After that, I became interested in VGM on a level that permitted me to seek the discs out. Previously, I had thought the only way to enjoy it was to put the game on "sound test" and find the tracks you like, or just load the game up and go to a part where the music you wanted was.

At that point, I had started to develop a dislike towards most mainstream music which would eventually blossom into an intense hatred (only a few songs from a few artists I can actually tolerate). Shortly after, I discovered STC and would continue to lurk there until becoming Idolores sometime in 2004/2005.

It's been a trip. I collected as much VGM as I could, but most of it was bootlegs (save for a pristine Digicube Xenogears Creid I found at a local anime convention), and sometime in 2005, I threw out every game OST I had bought that was bootlegged, and dedicated myself to buying legitimate copies of all I had ever owned. My collection is currently sitting at 80 OST's in total, with two more on the way from our very own Bernhardt. My most prized disc is the Racing Lagoon OST. I searched for it for years until Conn stumbled across a copy at Yahoo Japan and acted as a middleman to get it to me.

Thanks, everyone. I love you guys.

I bought my first VGM CDs 12 years ago, FFVII Reunion Tracks and Street Fighter Alpha.
I knew nothing about the market at that time, so it turned out later on that these were SonMay bootlegs. My first legit OST was Xenogears, one year later.
I was vaguely aware that VGM CDs existed before 1997, because I had seen an ad for the Chrono Trigger OST in a videogame magazine once.
1997 was also the year I created my first Email address.

10 years ago I first visited Soundtrack Central, introduced to the place through Darkmage007 (does anyone remember him?), who was a personal friend of mine.

In 1997, I remember going to college to study Artificial Intelligence, my cat dying during the introduction week, me dropping out after a month because it wasn't what I expected, then immediately signing up for the Faculty of Japanese studies at a totally different University, and that's how I ended up where I am today.

1999 was the first year I went to Japan, where I discovered that games and VGM CDs are plentiful and cheap. That was a nice year

Hotline?

And you've been there since? Must've been an amazing experience.

That was it!

I've been there on and off actually.
I went back home in 2000, then back to Japan in 2001, and back home again in 2002.
Eventually I came for the final (and current) time in 2006, and I haven't left since

My first soundtrack was Kefka's Domain in 1994 or 1995, followed by the same bootleg issues everyone else had for a while.  Wrote some crappy reviews when a teenager for previous renditions of this website, and posted once the boards came around under the name strohmie.  1999 found me downloading the tracks from Legend of Mana's sampler OST and thinking Yoko Shimomura was in the midst of writing the greatest video game OST of all time.  Whoops!  I worked at the NIH in an FDA research lab as a high school senior and remembered playing Pain the Universe through the computer speakers, then frantically shutting them off when my preceptor came back into the room.  I think that was around when I was a reviewer for TotalRPG but I could be off by a year or two?

Good times.

.,..you mean she wasn't?

I remember getting Yoko Kanno and Yoko Shimomura mixed up all the time.

And Yoko Ono?

What about her? Oh, you mean how she broke up the Beatles?

Oh, no! You did NOT just go there! *snap snap*

Oh but I did girlfriend!

Ashley Winchester: One bad motherf-cker.

Oh geez, we are so hopeless!

To paraphrase Lockon Stratos, "That's how Soundtrack Central rolls".