When I was a teenager I worked during the school vacations in order to afford a stereo system. One that was loud and sounded decent. Those came in modules back in the day. It took me a couple of years to make the system complete. I started with an amplifier, speakers and a tape deck.
Basically I wanted to steal music. But those terms were not around back in the day. All I knew was that Albums would cost 20 DM when a pack of Cigarettes ‘only’ cost 3. Both we could not afford. So we rolled our own and taped records. I borrowed my parents record player and my friends albums to get to the music that I liked. That was more than twenty five years ago, and the record industry obviously survived me stealing their music. But they could have noticed a trend a long time ago. They decided not to. They thought their business is to sell physical artifacts that happen to make sounds in the right equipment. First Vinyl then Compact Disc and finally Super CD / Audio DVD. It seems pretty obvious that the record industry got stuck on some model that became irrelevant.
Napster came along at the same time those super high tech next generation audio formats were introduced. Surprisingly people cared about music not about the latest amount of quality that those industry suggestions had to offer.