Try before you buy is what piracy is for. I would prefer if there was another venue to try before paying, but the industry hasn't figured this out in the past hundred years, so piracy it is.
Streaming could be an acceptable compromise if it was $10 a year for everything in existence, but the catalogues are splintered across multiple services and even when you combine them all there are plenty of things not available.
Try bandcamp (no really it's actually been improving over the years). Also there's still youtube for trying popular ones. Should cover "trying" almost all music legally afaik.
There are a bunch of albums I found on Youtube that I ended up buying, yes. It's only a very small percentage of my collection, though and not generally how I discover new music.
Streaming could be an acceptable compromise if it was $10 a year for everything in existence, but the catalogues are splintered across multiple services and even when you combine them all there are plenty of things not available.