First half of my story feels surprisingly similar, despite being born much earlier and in a very developed country. Piracy only through tapes, later writable CDs and eventually also mp3 on writable CDs. When the Napster wave hit, I had my first "real" money beyond kids affordance and started buying a little more. Napster and its successors just felt too easy, that music did not feel sufficiently "mine", like a handmade copy on physical media did, despite being just as unlicensed. Very often, the records I did buy were quite a disappointment at first, before they started growing on me, and some of what I consider the best today would have never made it past that threshold if they happened in the abundance of Spotify or the heyday of unbounded internet piracy.
It's actually quite ironic: all my friends who indulged in Napster et al now have spotify accounts, whereas I have just stopped extending my repository of CD rips.