Why no one bought mp3s back then

I got a free song as a promotion a few months ago. I thought, what's the big deal? It's free! The site was a slightly-less-popular mp3 store. I browse their limited selection of music until I found a track I liked.

I bought it with the coupon code and downloaded it. It was a DRMed wma file encoded at 192kbps, which I regard as the bare minimum for enjoying music on my setup. It wouldn't play in Foobar2000 (aka the best media player ever made) so I had to use WMP to listen. I then looked into DRM removal methods but had trouble until I found a program that worked. After ripping the DRM, the file's bitrate was 130kbps!! What a waste of money, if I wanted that quality I'd just find a youtube video with HQ.

So I got over it, until I checked the specifications of my sound card (as I want to upgrade to a real one soon), and found this:

There are in total 17 new entries in my dxdiag. Which makes a difference because it's probably backed by hundreds of unnecessary registry keys bent on slowing my pc down.

I don't usually complain about music DRM because secondhand CDs nowadays are very cheap on the internet (well, mainstream stuff at least). No wonder why napster caught on. I just wish there was a p2p network made up of purely original or remixed material, that would be cool.