I'll state that personally I'd never pay for ANY file (doesn't matter what it is)...if there'd a CD I want, it'll eventually show up at one of the thrift stores or the local Used CD store. Then I'll just buy it there (which I've done plenty of times) and have better quality than some downloaded MP3. If I want MP3's for portability I can make my own off that CD..
This mindset, also, makes a LOT more sense than it did when I was a young adult. Those who are younger than perhaps 40 (and, if your username has anything to do with birth date, you're RIGHT on that edge), and especially if they started using computers early in the game when Windows 3.1 or Windows 95 was still the newest software, "scarcity" of media is only a childhood memory. Going back a little bit farther, into the 1970's, it was not even readily possible to buy movies, and old music (especially rock and roll or country "oldies") could only be found easily on reissue vinyl and mostly only in larger cities. (Granted, I knew how to find this stuff much more readily, as it's WHAT I DO, but I'm definitely the exception. Just ask G-Lexington. He knows what I mean here.)
It is STILL true that experiencing recorded media of any kind, can only be done comfortably ONE THING AT A TIME. (OK, I like music "mash-up" and collage too, but that is an
extreme acquired taste, and it barely exists at all.) The amount of music that now exists is incredible. If there's something that 72-Jay or anybody else wants, chances are that it is only ONE item out of hundreds or perhaps thousands of items that provide entertainment, and in many cases the Jones can be satisfied by going to YouTube. While waiting for any of those seven things you really want to show up somewhere, you're going to find another 9 or 182 things that are fine for you, so just because your wanted early Nickelback CD hasn't shown up in your favorite shopping places yet, you don't walk away media-starved, you probably find something else you like. Unless one's tastes are very restricted, it's difficult not to find something that's satisfactory.
And, therefore, one can still occupy listening time with moozik, even if it isn't the EXACT moozik that you were trying to get.
72-Jay, what do you do, though, when you like a band and they're not actually releasing CD's? That's something much more common now, and that wasn't true 15 or 20 years ago. Nowadays even some of the tunes (Oh NOES!!! I didn't call them
songs! Stop this before it spreads!!!) on Billboard's "Hot 100" singles charts are DOWNLOADS only, with no analogous "hard copy" available. Though, if the artist is successful enough to land on the Hot 100, they'll usually release an album eventually. But even if they put that song (ahhhhh...that's better) on the album, it may not be the mix that you want.
I still remember sitting in front of the radio in 1966, hoping against hope that the soul FM station from Toledo, Ohio (the only source, at the time, to hear soul music on FM) would eventually play Wilson Pickett's "Land of 1,000 Dances" - and how ecstatic I was when they finally DID play it...and I snagged that thing onto a reel to reel tape!!!
Strangely, though I was living in a county with a population near 100,000...there was NO full-service record store in the area which actually stocked records that were no longer on the Charts. That was a very unusual circumstance, indeed. Much later I found out that even places like Pampa, Texas and Spencer, West Virginia and Linton, Indiana and Red Bluff, California had full service record stores during that same time.
Wonder what those woulda cost someone when they were new? (probably shoulda grabbed that stuff & re-sold it on ebay LOL)
