An Obituary for the CD

I've having a moderate bout of insomnia. This happens occasionally. I'm just glad this time it happened on a night when I don't have to get up for work in the morning.
So I recently got married, and before that, I did not have cable, broadband, satellite or any other high-speed link to the outside world. I just watched Jeff Passolt on the Channel 9 News at 9, and listened to Power 96, Faribault's home of rock. I used to have satellite, but I rarely watched it except for the channel Fuse, a Canadian music channel that features a heavy metal program called Uranium. Uranium rocks!
Well, my husband set up the digital TV we received as a very generous wedding gift, and then signed up for broadband. Now I have unprecedented access to the metal I love. There is a digital Metal music station that plays on the TV, and with the broadband, I can download all my favorite episodes of Uranium to watch on my iPoo. Right now I'm watching the metal station on TV, and they're playing Obituary. My very first CD was Obituary, "The End Complete". I bought it used at the Summer of Love store in Eagan, which was owned and staffed by a guy I'd suspect was an original hippy. He owned an obese cat that liked to perch on the CD bins and watch people entering the store. I didn't even know who Obituary was. I just liked the cover art by Andreas Marschall.
My Obituary CD is downstairs, carefully filed alphabetically amongst the 200+ CDs I've purchased since then. I'm on the fence about whether I should purchase CDs anymore. I can listen to MP3s in my Echo (I bought this fancy $88 stereo that is enclosed in the trunk a couple of years ago). Plus my new cell phone and the iPoo play MP3s. I think some of the DVD players around the house play them too (since merging households, there are around seven DVD players at my house. I gave one to Grandma. The others are just hanging out.)
The only drawback to moving away from CDs is that when I paid for and downloaded a digital format song from the Walmart site, I discovered it is not an MP3. Instead it is in some special format that only plays on the computer that you downloaded it to. The speakers on the Pillowtop are not that great for listening to music. This seems like a goofy system. If I go to the actual store, I can buy the CD and listen to it on any player. If I download the contents of the CD, I can only listen to them on the Pillowtop and the cost is almost as much as buying the physical CD. Doesn't this system just encourage music piracy? People can go out, buy the CD for eleven dollars, convert it to MP3 and post it on their website to illegally distribute it to the entire world. But I can't legally pay for the MP3. If you have some knowledge about the MP3 distribution system, please send me an email or post a comment here.