MP3
Research into a compressed format for digitized music began in Germany in 1987 at Fraunhofer Institut Integrierte Schaltungen research center. The project was code named "EUREKA." Dieter Seitzer and Karlheinz Brandenburg were the two major contributors to the project. Mr. Brandenburg is often referred to as the "father" of the MP31.
MP3 stands for MPEG Audio Layer III and it is a standard for audio compression that makes any music file smaller with little or no loss of sound quality. MP3 is part of MPEG, an acronym for Motion Pictures Expert Group, a family of standards for displaying video and audio using lossy compression. Standards set by the Industry Standards Organization or ISO, beginning in 1992 with the MPEG-1 standard. MPEG-1 is a video compression standard with low bandwidth. The high bandwidth audio and video compression standard of MPEG-2 followed and was good enough to use with DVD technology. MPEG Layer III or MP3 involves only audio compression2.
Timeline - History of MP3
- 1987 - The Fraunhofer Institut in Germany began research code-named EUREKA project EU147, Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB).
- January 1988 - Moving Picture Experts Group or MPEG was established as a subcommittee of the International Standards Organization/International Electrotechnical Commission or ISO/IEC.
- April 1989 - Fraunhofer received a German patent for MP3.
- 1992 - Fraunhofer's and Dieter Seitzer’s audio coding algorithm was integrated into MPEG-1.
- 1993 - MPEG-1 standard published.
- 1994 - MPEG-2 developed and published a year later.
- November 26, 1996 - United States patent issued for MP3.
- September 1998 - Fraunhofer started to enforce their patent rights. All developers of MP3 encoders or rippers and decoders/players now have to pay a licensing fee to Fraunhofer.
- February 1999 - A record company called SubPop is the first to distribute music tracks in the MP3 format.
- 1999 - Portable MP3 players appear. (Table Source)3
As noted elsewhere on this site, in 1999, Shawn Fanning invented Napster which began the wholesale theft of music tracks on the internet.
Music Industry Reaction
The music industry was caught flat-footed by the ramifications of the MP3. It's not that they didn't know something was happening, they just didn't know what to do about it. The book, "Appetite for Self-Destruction" by Steve Knopper has an excellent discussion of the development of the mp3 and the music industry's reactions. Let us quote a few sections:
In 2007, Doug Morris, sixty-eight-year-old chief executive officer of the Universal Music Group, the world's largest record company, gave an interview to Wired magazine that left many in the record industry frowning in stunned silence. He was talking about major labels in the late 1990s and why he and his contemporaries didn't plunge into internet music more quickly. "There's no one in the record company that's a technologist," he said. That's a misconception writers make all the time, that the record industry missed this. They didn't. They just didn't know what to do. It's like if you were suddenly asked to operate on your dog to remove his kidney. What would you do?" Responded the Wired writer: "personally, I would hire a vet." Morris shot back: "We didn't know who to hire. I wouldn't be able to recognize a good technology person—anyone with a good bullsh[*]t story would have gotten past me."
Steve Knopper doesn't quite agree with Mr. Morris's take on things. He (Knopper) says…
Granted, record labels didn't have high-tech staffs on the level of Apple Computer or Sun Microsystems. But Morris's memory of his own staff at the time was disturbingly out of touch. "There were only like forty people trying to get Doug's attention," says Erin Yasgar, who headed Universal's first new-media department, beginning in 1998.
Knopper goes on to talk about how different technologists at different labels tried different things, none of which really worked in any financially meaningful way.
Our take on this is closer to Morris's perceptions. Here we are, over a decade later and what we call the "opposition," the collection of net neutrality and net privacy and net free speech advocates as well as the technologists who are the pirates and the technologists at companies like the ISPs and even Google and others with a dog in this fight continue to be way ahead and way more technically knowledgeable than the labels, the movie studios, and their trade organizations. Moreover, nothing material was being done "back then, and in our view, little meaningful is being done now.
The major initiative underway world wide right now seems to be the "graduated response" or "three strikes" approach. We think this is largely another tail-chasing exercise for reasons we set forth here.
