I was lucky enough to live in a freshman college dorm (a music-focused dorm, no less!) circa 1997-1998 when Napster was still a thing right after MP3's were a thing, and that shit was amaaaaazing
I mean given how much people love music, I never had any doubt that MP3's would be revolutionary
These days it's a USB cable rather than a cinch cable, and vorbis/flac rather than mp3, but my PC has been my main music player for more than 25 years -- and the only pair of "game" speakers I've owned were positioned in the living room. Come to think of it, those speakers may very well have been the reason I was allowed a computer in my bedroom :)
Anyway... thank you for prompting that trip down memory lane, I enjoyed it.
To put a timeline on this: I also ended up buying one of those Empeg in-dash MP3 players.
I couldn't read a single word of Swedish or Russian, but my friends and I figured out how to navigate to the music downloads.
I remember my processor struggled so much even playing it, I basically had to just listen to the mp3 on its own. I eventually figured out I could play 96kbps mp3s without slowing things down too much. These were such amazing times for me, suddenly exposed to an entire planet of music there's zero possible chance I would have otherwise heard.