I mean, people at the time did have large collections of CDs with tons of music. Piracy existed, sure, but it was something a relatively small number of tech-sa

I mean, people at the time did have large collections of CDs with tons of music. Piracy existed, sure, but it was something a relatively small number of tech-savvy people were doing. Hell only half of Americans were even using the internet at the time. And at the time, MP3s were super inconvenient - you needed a CD for your stereo or whatever you were listening to music on, and CD-R drives had only just started to become cheap (and by cheap, I still mean several hundred dollars, which was quite a bit at the time). I would be in no way surprised if greater than 90% of the music that was loaded onto the first cohort of ipods came directly from CDs.