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ballsoutofthebathtub t1_j6hiucn wrote

F for everyone who didn't pirate music and instead built vast iTunes libraries costing thousands only for streaming to come along a few years later.

I mean they did support the artists by doing this, but it just feels like the music industry had its fun getting people to buy the same album again and again every time a new format came along.

As other people have mentioned though, CD ripping was a huge thing and was built into iTunes, so you could easily fill an iPod with music you had technically paid for.

I personally went through phases of all-out Limewire piracy, CD buying and legit digital purchases. It was just kind of messy and as a young person I couldn't afford to buy every song I wanted to listen to. Streaming definitely came around and tidied the whole thing up.

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lotusflower64 t1_j6hsaq8 wrote

I did both but the CDs came before the iPod. Those and my free house music podcasts. Purchased a few albums and singles from iTunes that I could not borrow the CDs from friends to rip.

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slashthepowder t1_j6ifms6 wrote

The other sad thing is music quality. Went from CD quality to a compressed lossy format to finally now just getting back to near lossless.

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marintrails t1_j6ir70y wrote

Don't forget that when they switched from vinyl to CDs they doubled the price overnight "temporarily to repay for the cost of the factories". Of course the prices never went down.

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ballsoutofthebathtub t1_j6it7g4 wrote

Yes they were massively greedy and got punished for it once file sharing came along.

I remember I bought a Prodigy CD which is fittingly called ‘The Fat of the Land’ some time around ‘99 or 2000. For some reason I never took the price sticker off, so I remember it costing £19.99! That’s fucking mental. The minimum wage at the time was £3.60.

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