When I was living in Champaign, one hit that I heard on the radio was "Inside" by Patti Rothberg. Another was "Mother Mother" by Tracy Bonham. I liked both. They were very different songs, but I nevertheless got the artists confused. When I heard "Treat Me Like Dirt" by Patti Rothberg one night, I recognized the name but couldn't correctly connect it to her other hit.
Time passed, and I didn't hear "Treat Me Like Dirt" again, but it stuck with me. One day in the record store, I mistakenly bought Tracy Bonham's album trying to get it. Back then my disc purchasing was sporadic, haphazard, and often impulsive. I recognized Bonham's name and thought she was the one who had two hits I liked. This was one of a small set of purchases that put me off buying CDs for years.
More time passed. A lot more. Napster came and went without me really getting into it, but I traded music files online in other ways, and one day I ran across "Inside" again. Reminded of music long past, I downloaded all of "Between the 1 and the 9", and I liked it a lot.
I bought an incredibly cheap used copy of the album from Amazon, and I bought a shiny new copy of the follow-up, "Candelabra Cadabra" (which I also liked, but not as much as the first album) at some brick and mortar.
These days, this kind of story is typical of the long tail, but I didn't know that when it happened. It knocked me out that I was into this artist who I hadn't heard on the radio in years, and that I'd rediscovered her through the Internet.
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