[jonnathanson]

"(if technically challenged) simply bought it physically and then ripped it to iTunes."

Minor nitpick, but ripping from CD to iTunes in the early days was a nontrivial process for the technically challenged. I'd argue that audiophiles were the group most likely to have done this, i.e., to get lossless music files. (The resulting file sizes were monstrous, of course, and this eventually led to some storage issues. But I digress.)

I'd argue that the technically challenged were the vanguard of buying music files on iTunes. The tech-savvy were torrenting, and everyone else found the iTunes store a really easy way to click and download music. In fact, I distinctly remember snarky comments back in the day about how paying $0.99 per track on iTunes was "a tax on technical illiteracy."

[xenobioticants]

If you inserted a CD, iTunes instantly offered to rip it for you, fully automatically. Didn't even need to fiddle with settings, it was literally just pressing 'ok'.

I'd say of the technically challenged there was a subset that used iTunes to buy maybe a few tracks or albums, and certainly not enough to keep them 'trapped' in the Apple ecosystem.

[jonnathanson]

"If you inserted a CD, iTunes instantly offered to rip it for you, fully automatically."

You're correct. I think my memory of product timelines in the early days is a bit hazy.

Even still, I'd love to see data that ripping from CD was a prevalent use case at all in the early days. I believe it was originally intended as an onboarding process / ecosystem-lock mechanism. The assumption: a lot of consumers (at the time) have CD libraries; by allowing them to easily port over to iTunes, we can port their libraries onto our ecosystem; from there, we have them. That was clearly the idea...but I'd love to learn more about how common a use case this ended up being.

[hinkley]

Purchased or no, there was an investment in time and money to populate your iTunes library. I think the original comment stands on its own.