Hey Beth - do you have a Borders or a Barnes&Noble near you? Any bookstore that sells music will have listening stations where u can listen to samples from virtually anything in the store before you buy it. I believe places like Sam Goody and Coconuts do this as well.
Some people mentioned before that Walmart has a system where u can scan in the barcode of the CD ur interested in and hear some samples of that too.
I also suggest maybe waiting 'till AFTER the holidays this year. I worked at Barnes&Nobles for three years, and got some of my favorite holiday music for DIRT CHEAP this way:
Barnes&Noble always has a big selection of "no-name" holiday music CDs (usually OUTSIDE of the music section, near the rest of the impulse-buys by the registers...so u cant listen to them b4 u buy them) for around 9.99 during the holidays. After the holidays, the collections go down to 5$, and then to 1$. Since they aren't "famous" editors or singers, they're always cheap, and since they can't be returned to the distrbutors, bookstores will sell them at any price to get them off the shelves after the holidays are over.
They may be "no-name," but a lot of them are real quality music...they do the old fashioned songs the way they were meant to be done. Some are AWEFUL, but some are really good. I used to buy around 5 or 6 of them and make mix-CDs out of the worth-while songs on them.
It's a bit of a craps-shoot, but it's not pirating, and sometimes u end up with really great stuff!
Let us know what u end up doing!
