MP3
The arrival of MP3 put the music of the world at everyone's fingertips
By Ken C. Pohlmann
Photo Illustration by Chris Gould

What a difference a day makes — let alone five years! In 1999, CD sales were strong, and the CD’s two worthy successors, DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD, were preparing to carry the disc legacy into the new millennium. Then, almost overnight, downloading, streaming, and file sharing changed the way millions of people obtain music, shaking up the entire relationship between the record labels and their customers, and forever changing the way music is sold. The convergence of the Web, MP3 coding, and peer-to-peer file-sharing programs like Napster and KaZaA will go down in history as an example of what happens when worlds collide. And S&V was there, witness to monumental change.

In April 1999, I wrote a column titled “Manifest Destiny” predicting the creation of a giant worldwide jukebox that would allow people to listen to any piece of music ever recorded by paying a buck or less. In the same issue, David Ranada tackled the more immediate problem of MP3 sound quality, concluding that the files can sound good but can also sound very bad. Would high-fidelity become a thing of the past?

By November, S&V was delving into the intricacies of downloading. We described the Madison Project, IBM’s prototype system to deliver CDs via downloading, and hazarded that CD downloading could be available by that Christmas. (It wasn’t.) Meanwhile, December’s “MP3 Revolution” noted that “MP3” had overtaken “sex” as the most popular search keyword on the Internet. More concretely, we pinpointed 99¢ per download as the magic price. In the same issue, we pitted five portable MP3 players against each other and concluded that “the revolution has just begun.”

In our futuristic January 2000 issue, we asked experts to consider what impact broadband access would have on entertainment in the home. They (correctly) predicted a world of flash memory, 500-gigabyte (GB) hard drives, online communities, and movies and TV shows on demand. In an accompanying article, I said that new technology would create “a golden age of audio.” While music lovers would probably agree with that assessment, the record labels might not.

My July/August column, entitled “The Killer App,” observed that “the little Napster app had about the same effect as a mile-wide asteroid smashing into midtown Manhattan.” I was wrong. The asteroid was actually the size of Wyoming. Napster was the tipping point, and even when litigation shut it down, peer-to-peer file sharing prospered. Programs like KaZaA and Grokster let music lovers find just about any song ever recorded and download it for free.

January 2001 found us testing a new breed of component that attempted to bridge the gap between PCs and stereos. For example, Dell’s Digital Audio Receiver played MP3 files stored on a PC’s hard drive, distributing them through a home network to your stereo system. Clearly, MP3 files had gained legitimacy and were moving beyond the realm of cheap PC speakers. In the April issue Dan Kumin reviewed the NAD C660 CD recorder/MP3 disc player, one of the first to play discs containing MP3 files. Today, MP3 playback is almost a standard feature on audio players. In November, Yamaha broke new ground with the CDR-HD1000, which played and recorded CDs and housed a 20-GB hard-disk drive for ripping, editing, and storing music. Another piece of the future — low-cost, large-capacity hard drives — had arrived.

The nefarious ways the record labels might use to copy-protect their music was the subject of Stephen Booth’s “Access Denied” (April 2002), which predicted that “issues raised by copy protection will undoubtedly become even thornier.” In May, Dan Kumin reviewed five digital audio servers that could swallow up entire music collections, concluding, “the digital audio genie has been let out of its optical-disc prison.”

By the time 2003 rolled around, it was clear that the old world of record stores, and of tape and disc players, was becoming less important. Today’s world is one of the Internet, KaZaA, MP3, WMA, iPods, iTunes, ripping, burning, and monster hard drives. In June, Jim Willcox asked the billion-dollar question, “Where have all the CDs gone?” Are slumping sales due to file sharing, uninspired music, less money to spend, or a combination of those factors? Choosing to blame it on file sharing, the record labels initiated lawsuits against music lovers.

Clearly, we’ve seen the end of one era and the beginning of a new one. Downloading is huge and will only get bigger. Whether it’s for free from Earth Station 5, $5 a month from Rhapsody, or 99¢ a song from iTunes, more and more listeners are logging on to get their music. Five years from now, you’ll be buying lots of music — and movies — online, and your collection will neatly reside on a hard disk. My guess would be about 100,000 stereo and multichannel songs on something the size of an iPod. The only question is, when will S&V get that small?