The Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, which is part of the German research institution that funded MP3 development in the late 80s, announced late last month that its licensing for MP3-related patents has ended. Another audio format called Advanced Audio Coding, or AAC, is now the "de facto standard for music download and videos on mobile phones.
Grill might be absolutely spot-on. But more than the quality of compression and file size, the MP3 might actually deserve to die, simply because the engineers who created it were working only upon assumptions on how humans processed sonic information, according to a report by NPR.
In short, MP3 might not have been the best way to hear music after all. But that aside, let's take a look at a brief history of the MP3. How it was invented, how it spread globally, and how it eventually died. Fraunhofer-Gesellshaft, a German company, invented and developed MP3, and has licensed patents to the compression technology until its recent demise.
Each ended up with patents for various related technologies. But this joint research would spawn trouble down the line. Lucent sued Microsoft with whom it was also embroiled in other patent battles , claiming that it was infringing on Lucent's MP3-related patents. Alcatel, a French competitor, bought Lucent, and the suit was continued by Alcatel-Lucent. Of course, this leaves the door open for another lawsuit or an appeal, so as of early , we may not have heard the end of the matter.
MP3 has had some far-reaching effects that few could have predicted. In , the MP3-playing computer software Winamp became available. Allowing users to easily organize their music files and create playlists, Winamp was a harbinger of players to come.
They could hold a limited number of songs via flash memory, but those made way for hard drive memory players with higher storage capacity, like the original iPod , introduced in , which played MP3s, AIFF and WAV formats. MP3s are so ubiquitous that portable music players are often called MP3 players even though most play a variety of formats. Peer-to-peer music sharing service Napster was introduced in , and it caused the popularity of the MP3 format to explode by making more digital music available than ever before.
It also caused a great deal of controversy related to copyright infringement, illegal music downloads and piracy. The Recording Industry Association of America, among others, sought legal recourse against Napster as well as individual music downloaders. Napster was shut down in , but other similar services popped up in its place, although perhaps none as brazen.
This newfound availability of music whetted the public's appetite for digital music, which has caused big changes in the music industry. The studios continue to fight piracy, but eventually embraced online digital music sales.
Studios began licensing much of their music to companies such as Apple, whose iTunes store paved the way for a new music consumption model. Amazon is also a huge seller of digital music. And digital music sales have overtaken the sale of physical CDs.
Digital music has even allowed some artists to break away from studios by giving them a means to easily distribute their own work, democratizing the system a bit. These changes have also paved the way for legitimate music streaming services that make money from advertisements and subscriptions. MP3 also helped change how and where we listen to our music. We can record larger numbers of songs to writable CDs than could be traditionally held on pre-recorded CDs.
And modern players allow us to carry thousands of songs around with us either purchased digitally or ripped from our own CD collections. The MP3 and its successors have made entire music libraries portable. There is some debate as to whether MP3s sound particularly good compared to other, less lossy codecs, but despite great increases in Internet speed and storage space, MP3 is still the most common digital music format, and it shows few signs of going away.
People are even working on things like embedding secret messages or other hidden information in MP3s MP3Stego, for instance. MP3 has become the norm for digital music, and until something groundbreakingly different comes along, it may remain so for a while. How MP3 came about and what encoding the files entails made for pretty fascinating research.
I've always been a fairly heavy consumer of music, first on vinyl, then tape, then CD, and I think it's fortuitous for music lovers that MP3 and other digital music formats came along and spurred the widespread distribution of music online sound quality debates aside. I still like owning physical copies, but back in the days when in-store purchasing was our only choice, there was always a good possibility of disappointment.
I shelled out for quite a few CDs often to discover that I only really liked one or two of the songs. Many of those disks are gathering dust on my shelves. At some point I made a rule for myself that I would only buy an album if I knew I liked at least three of the songs unless it was by one of my very favorite artists , and that seriously curbed my music purchasing.
It's not like entire albums routinely get radio or music video play. But then things like Napster came along that allowed us to sample a wider variety of music than we'd been able to encounter by chance on the air before. And then Internet radio followed. I cannot tell you how many new artists I've discovered via my Pandora stations, and how many of their songs I've downloaded from iTunes. There is probably some charm missing because we no longer get surprised by the b-side songs before long, no one is even going to know what that means.
But it is nice being able to spread the money around on tunes I know I'll listen to more than once. And now I can also digitize those lonely songs from the poor mostly-rejected CDs and listen to them just about anywhere without having to carry a bunch of disks with me, thanks to MP3 and its cousins.
Jump ahead to the late s, when the sun had set on cassettes as the favored music delivery format in favor of compact discs and, for the technologically savvy, digital mp3 files. But electronic firms around the globe were betting that the CD would soon follow the cassette into extinction. Which mp3 player would get there first and become the next 'Walkman'? It sold 50, players globally in its first year. By the launch of the iPod in , there were approximately 50 portable mp3 players available in the U.
Compared to the Walkman and cassettes, the story was very different for mp3s. You couldn't purchase them in traditional retail settings. Downloading an album--legally or not--could be a multi-hour affair.
It didn't matter that MPMan was first--it wouldn't have mattered if they were 6th, 23rd, or 42nd. Without the widespread availability of mp3s and broadband, the value proposition could not come together. The MP3 player market did eventually consolidate around a dominant product, Apple's iPod. But the iPod, launched in late three years after the MPMan--was anything but a first mover. How can we understand the iPod's success despite its delayed entry?
Apple waited, and then waited some more--until it finally made its move, putting the last two pieces in place to create a winning innovation: an attractive, simple device supported by smart software.
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