I’ve heard a compelling counter argument that Napster was more a convenient scapegoat for the music industry than the actual root cause of its downfall. That the popularity of the CD format caused a mini-boom of sales in the late 80’s and 90’s as the convenience factor brought in new customers and existing music fans replaced their scratched up cassettes and vinyls with CD versions of those albums. Similar to the DVD boom of the late 90’s through late aughts.

But any boom has to come down at some point, the sales will return to earth. The decline just happened to coincide with file sharing and enough critical mass of high speed internet (so much of file sharing in the early days was kids tapping into their university’s high speed connection). So it gave the music industry an excuse to the public (and more importantly, investors) that, no, it’s not that those sales numbers were unsustainable, it’s those ne’r do well brats stealing our songs. If the authorities just cracked down on those criminals, sales would go back up.