The experience of Napster, Limewire and Kazaa was pretty bad at the time. Plenty of songs were low quality, mislabeled, skipping, incomplete, or radio recording

The experience of Napster, Limewire and Kazaa was pretty bad at the time. Plenty of songs were low quality, mislabeled, skipping, incomplete, or radio recordings with announcers talking over them, which was especially frustrating when it'd take 5 minutes to download a single song. I was a teenager limited to summer job money, but I was happy to buy music on the iTunes store when it launched. I bought CDs as well, but my primary motivation for piracy was that record stores had a limited selection and often exorbitant prices (because the industry was engaged in price fixing^), and the record labels seemed to care more about stopping online music consumption and forcing people to buy CDs than actually providing a worthwhile paid service–their official channels were godawful, see PressPlay. ^ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_price_fixing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_price_fixing