The Digital Music Revolution

The Digital Music Revolution

Every day, billions and billions of bytes of information trade hands over the Internet. Often, this data is copyrighted, thereby making its sharing illegal. Information can range from online books to computer applications, games, movies, and even cross-stitch needlework patterns. But possibly the largest percentage consists of one specific kind of media: digital music.

Programs have popped up all over the market to take part in this mass media exchange. Gnutella, Scour, iMesh, CuteMX, and the leader of the music revolution, the almighty Napster, are some popular examples, although these are just a few. Controversy over digital media is widespread, and legal action is being taken by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) against many of these companies. You might ask yourself how all of this began. The digital music revolution happened because of the creation of the MP3 digital media compression standard.

MP3 is short for MPEG-1 Layer 3 (Moving Pictures Expert Group), a format for storing digital audio.

It [MP3] uses an advanced type of audio compression which reduces the filesize with little reduction in quality. MP3 is used particularly for music distribution over the Internet, but is also used for other purposes such as real-time digital audio transmissions over ISDN (used by reporters). MPEG-1 has been around since 1992, but during the last few years (1998/99) it has started to get widespread attention from regular media and ordinary users. (What is MP3)

In simple terms, this means that, using this kind of compression, digital music files can be shrunk so that they can be transferred faster over the Internet. "Without audio coding, downloading uncompressed high-quality audio files from a remote Internet server would result in unfavorably long transmission times" (FAQ).

The MP3 standard impacted the music industry almost overnight. People began "ripping" their music (extracting songs from a CD) and converting them into MP3's, then sharing their collection with other users like themselves all over the world, using the internet.

However, this doesn't explain the speed with which this revolution occurred. Just because some new technology is available on the market doesn't mean it will be put to use right away. Video phones are a good example of this. We have had the technology for video phones for many years, yet even today they are hard to find. This is because the current telephone system infrastructure has been an adequate, efficient solution. So what made MP3 technology so hot, so fast?