[Katsunami]

You're not the first... and you won't be the last.

In my case, I was lucky.

I got internet in 1998. That year, Internet by modem became feasible in the Netherlands with regard to pricing. (One could get internet since 1994 or so, but it was very expensive; like $40 for a monthly subscription, plus phone bills.)

It was too slow and expensive to download stuff that was bigger than a few megabytes. One (1) MB took about 4 minutes, so even a low-quality MP3 took 15 minutes to download. Not worth it. Get a second-hand CD, and make the MP3's yourself. It was cheaper.

Downloading bigger things only got feasable after I got cable in 2001 (again, I was one of the first to get this when it became available in my region). And at that point (2001), the iPod got introduced, and iTunes and many other stores started offering WMA, AAC and/or MP3's for sale, loaded with all kinds of different DRM (And 128 kBit quality to boot...).

Often, it wasn't even possible to play songs outside the player the seller offered, or they only worked on select devices. (So, they were comparable to non-stripped eBooks.) Many, maybe most of the non-iTunes stores died within 1-3 years, and it was "big news" that many people lost the content they paid for.

Therefore, I already am in the know from the very beginning, before I started to buy digital-only content. I started to buy digital-only content in 2009 or so, when GOG.com launched, and later, eBooks in 2011, after making sure I could get the DRM off of them. For music, I still go the second-hand CD-route to create my own digital music; FLAC files, this time around.

Many people, especially younger and older persons and not too tech-savvy people, are not that lucky. They sometimes get very nasty surprises with regard to content not being readable or available.