Was it free though? iTunes sold music for $1/song. Spotify and Pandora were ad-supported. People like me may have sailed the high seas as a teen in the 2000s, but those people didn't make up the majority of music listeners.

Today, I only buy physical media and from Bandcamp. The younger generation seem happy to pay subscriptions for Spotify and Apple Music. I think this has to do with mobile OSes hiding filesystem access and banning P2P apps from the walled garden.