When 95 released, smartphones weren't a thing, internet wasn't common for households, and downloading an album would take you a day if you were one of the lucky ones with an internet connection lol.
I think this is the completely wrong takeaway. You are lumping in two very different 15 year periods into your 30 year view and giving undue weight to the latter half. Year-over-year in the 90s everything was changing. Decade over decade, 2013 to 2023 was basically unchanged. Move forward a bit, 2016 to 2026 and the only interesting computing development has been LLMs. They're neat, but 1995 to 2005 was way, way more interesting.
In 1965 we didn't even have CPUs. Transistors and ICs were at their very beginning. "Network" meant a teleprinter.
That makes me wonder what the first pirated song was that was ripped to MP3 and provided for download over the Internet...
This changed with OSR2 I believe, when they started bundling IE4.