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I mostly collect pop music that I am familiar with, you know, stuck in the 60s, 70s and 80s. I have bought hundreds of albums over the years, replaced them with 8 tracks/cassettes and then CDs. Tower Records was one of the places I would browse through from time to time.
When Napster and Audiogalaxy, etc.. became popular though I began to find new music (at least new to me) from the various message boards and others recommendations. You could read someone's recommendation of a song and download it immediately. If I found something I liked sometimes I would click over to Amazon and buy the CD. I think the music industry really missed the boat by not embracing this concept. I think a lot of people like me were introduced to new music this way and inspired to buy CDs.
After the music industry began suing people I went underground like a lot of others. I know several people who are collecting all top 100 songs from 1920 to present in high quality 320 kbps MP3 format and a few who are even collecting these in lossless format. With the cost of mass storage going down this is not a big deal anymore.
All it takes to have the top 100 songs/albums of all time (about 40,000 songs) in high quality format is to have a friend with such a collection and purchase an external hard drive to copy them to. I imagine this is happening all over the world and people with perpetual jukeboxes will be commonplace before long.
None of the DRM encrypted file download sites are very appealing. I think the future will be with sites like AllOfMP3 where the selection is good and the quality is excellent.
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