> Let's agree to disagree then.
That's ok.
> FWIW, people selling copies of Vinyls and cassettes on blank cassettes were no real threat to the distribution business of a music label.
Precisely: crap quality and a medium that didn't last for very long even if you were careful with the cassettes. You usually got a year or two out of them before the tape got eaten, especially if you used them in cars. None of the tapes I had from that era survives. All of the MP3s I made in the '00s survive today.
> Even people copying CDs didn't harm them that much, because their reach and scale was always limited.
Copying CDs wasn't possible for the first two decades of the CD format because there were no writable CDs.
> They only got engaged when the scale increased (mass-copying of content).
Yes. Plextor was a factor in that, the MP3 format, the internet and a massive available catalog of high quality content without DRM.
> But when MP3 hit, every single upload was threatening their global distribution business, because suddenly someone was distributing for free.
That's because it was the last missing component. Fraunhofer didn't exactly make any friends in the music industry with that trick. But all of the other elements were just as much a requirement.
> The Quality of content didn't matter for the disruption of the business, a huge amount of popular music on Napster/LimeWire/AudioGalaxy/... was actually recorded from Radio,.
You see the same today with movie piracy: the DVD rips are the ones that really drive it, the 'cam' captures are junk.
> If cassettes were the peak media and pirated digital content would have been limited to recordings from cassettes, yet still distributed globally by every kid from everywhere on the planet who gets hold of ONE tape, the wheels would have been set in motion just the same.
It wouldn't have happened due to the generational loss between copies. And that's exactly why the availability of CD grade content matters because it effectively plugs you into the ADC at the studio instead of 3 different mastering steps in between. That's why 'virgin pressings' (the first 100 or so of the records off a new master) were so sought after, especially by fans of music with a high dynamic range.