Your mother is absolutely right and this old school way is not so old school, it's not mainstream but not really old school. But yeah piracy is a bit hard to accommodate, so in this way there are two options, teach her how to use it OR download her music.

If you support your favorite creators by going to their show or buying stuff I don't see the ethical problem of piracy. I've more than 1600 songs from a dozens of groups and I just love it, got the best quality (at least 16 bit 48Khz), can listen to the songs offline on my PC or with my iem (best kind of earbuds in my opinion).

The only downside is the size of the files, I have about 25gigs in my library, my phone and my pc have enough storage but if I'd like I could reduce this to around 5-6gigs by using "normal mp3 audio"