The smoking baby is wise, he is.

And what he said ^^.

i've found a lot of cool "bargain" cds (3 dollars or so) in the past few months.
louis armstrong, sugar, REM, tricky, jesus & mary chain, etc. okay a lot of them were over the summer but i know i've bought a good amount of the cds i purchased last month in the basement of the record store where the cheapest stuff is.
that's why i always think twice about things i may put back, not knowing anything about the particular artist, so i hesitate to buy it.

I have a friend who actually has the exact opposite approach. His attitude is, if one doesn't take chances, then one doesn't find the occasional gem. He deliberately buys stuff he's never heard of, before.

I'm not suggesting not taking chances. I'd guess I haven't heard a lick of 95% of what I buy. But I know enough about the album's reputation, some reviews, descriptive info, artist history, influences on him/her/them, artists influenced by him/her/them to have a pretty good idea of whether I'll like it or not. I'm saying take educated risks, not random gambles driven mainly by pricing.

He explicitly takes random gambles.

I mean, don't get me wrong -- he doesn't buy say, New Age, if he isn't into it, but he's into pretty much everything.

For example, he goes to the CDBaby 5$ bins and just starts adding to his cart, without listening to any of the samples.

I used to buy stuff based on album covers, but one too many emu albums dressed up as metal or industrial cured me of that.