If it’s 1999, you would go to a record store if you wanted to buy an album and depending on the store the would have a sampler disk and could tell you if it sucked or not. Also, if the songs where good you would have billboard to tell you how good it was as well as your local radio station.
Or you could just open Napster and download the whole album for free.
Its not actually, most of the oil was from plants that died before fungus and decaying bacteria evolved so the dead logs just sat there and would not decompose ever