alt Hacker NewsIt was also common to have a collection of CDs you owned and wanted to put on a device like this.
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Exactly. I mean sure, people were definitely pirating music. But lots of people are own huge collections of CDs, and you could also just borrow other people's CDs to rip them. We were kids without money, but older folks at the time did spend money on CDs.
Yeah, GP is rose-tinting piracy and Apple’s stance a bit…
When I was a teenager we had _dial-up_. My first 2 iPods were strictly playing ripped CDs, which I, friends, or family had bought. Buying the iPod itself was probably cheaper than 2 months worth of internet traffic back then.
I mean, sure, but at some point with 3 or 4 thousand cds crated up, it became a lot easier to steal than go crate digging in my own basement. And then when what.cd happened and you could literally grab a torrent of perfectly curated files of an artist’s whole catalog, the laziness really spiked.
We forget that the labels also consider that piracy. For a while there were attempts to make CDs un-rippable.
Streaming (which pays labels and artists much less) only exists because it's the compromise that solves the "service problem" side of piracy.