When I was in my teens, I spent waaay more money on CD's than I ever did on my Discman and headphones.
The fact that it's now the norm to spend more money on your audio hardware than on what you listen to is just an interesting reversal.
Since also many (like me) pirated their way in their teens I never purchased many cds. I got an mp3 early from japan with 512mb of disk space. This was huge, all my classmates had like 128mb or less.
It was clear for me anyway that I would never pay a lot for the music because there was simply no reason to. I haven't really experienced the time where it was a norm to spend a lot of money on cds.
I am 29 and this kind of experience you have seems to become more and more uncommon as time passes ;)
Airpods might have captured more of the market this year for headphones than Spotify captures for its market. Finally the people who use Spotify might use multiple services etc.
So even if you spend more money on your audio hardware than what you listen to I don't think we know if people actually spend more on their hardware than on what they listen to.
Back in the day you had to buy each album individually for $10-$15 (or more) each, same with movies. Nowadays I can go on Netflix and watch what would've been hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of DVDs for 13 bucks a month.