Absolutely none of this tracks for me, it smacks of someone extrapolating their tiny niche to the entire world.
PS: Limewire was loaded with browser toolbars and malware. The definition of corporate hell.
And I agree that the uncountably many software publishers of the time were aggressively experimenting with the dark monetization patterns that Doubleclick, Facebook, Google, Amazon and others were soon to refine into what are now only a handful of ~trillion dollar business engines.
Of course there was corporate participation in that era, but following the dot-com boom and its bust, the scale and number of these operations was very different than the small-and-consolidated Compuserve/AOL/Prodigy era of a decade before and equally different than titanic-and-consolidated Facebook/Google/Amazon era a decade later.
Every single soul in my class was pirating music online.
Napster was a blip (too early, very few had pcs) and only the tech saavy used it, but Kazaa, Soulseek and Limewire were absolutely huge among my cohort.
Btw I asked German friends my age and pretty much all of them have a similar experience.