You're coming at it from the POV of a "power user". Most people aren't that.

> Why would you buy an MP3 download if you already had the CD? The most popular MP3 player at the time - the iPod was used with iTunes that it made it very easy to rip your own CDs. There was a way to rip CDs in Windows 2 decades ago.

...actually, if you ripped a CD with iTunes, it would turn into a format that almost no software other than iTunes could read. The same thing was true about Windows media player. So you COULD rip stuff, but you would get from one kind of vendor lock-in into another kind of vendor lock-in. If you wanted MP3, you had to put a fair amount of thought into it, download special software, etc, i.e. you had to be a power user, and you had to put a lot of work into it if you had a couple hundred CDs on the shelf and wanted your collection to go on a hard disc. Besides myself I know only one other person who did that.

Also: I was making a more general point here. Substitute "DVD" for "CD" and "movie" for "music" and the argument still holds. DVDs had encryption that had to be cracked by somebody, the crack having to be obtained illegally by anybody who wants to rip a DVD.

The actual point I was making was the following: These examples show how, in one area, the tech industry will be hard at work trying to make certain things DIFFICULT (like cancelling a subscription deal, where they might accept fax as the only method of communication, or copying copyrighted material) and hard at work trying to make other things EASY (like signing up to a subscription deal, re-purchasing stuff you already own). Most people go the way of what's EASY. But that does not usually serve their own interests.

> The user has a choice between subscription music that has DRM, purchased music that is DRM free, or easy to use software that lets you convert physical CDs.

Purchasing music that is DRM-free happened very late in the game and is still a niche topic. The first businesses to try and offer downloads that you'd pay for (like napster when it tried to go legit) failed because they couldn't get content deals, because the music industry didn't want DRM-free downloads for fear they would be copied illegally. The first service that actually made it commercially viable was iTunes, and they only managed it because they could get the content industry on board through introducing DRM. -- The fact that we now have DRM-free downloads in certain niche areas is a side-effect of the fact that most people have subscription packages now anyway, and offering DRM-free high-quality music is now a way to charge them YET ANOTHER time. (purchasing that Beatles album for the fifth time).

> CD-RWs were already backwards compatible with CDs. I was burning CDs using a parallel port CDRW in the late 90s. You’ve been able to take a record player, connect it to the audio in Of a computer, record the audio and burn it to a CD. I’m sure there were standalone boxes that let you do it.

That made YOU a 1-percenter when it comes to technology. Most people I knew in the late 90s could have never figured out how to hook up a record player to a computer, record a WAV file, and burn it back to a CD. -- You're not representative for how that industry works/worked at any point in history.