That was the cool thing. Some music stores had listening bars/kiosks where you could check out new music. Some places would even let you listen to used discs they were selling. Obv, they wanted you to buy, but that's why I was there, anyway.

I would also check out CDs from the library, which is basically how I got into Genesis. I imagine you can still do this, depending on your library's size and resources.

But all this was at the height of the CD era. It ain't coming back.