How MP3 Changed Music

MP3: Wikimedia Common/Public Domain



            Many people have listened to MP3 files or owned an MP3 player, but I am willing to bet that most people do not know what MP3 is. In a world where everything is instant and accessible most people would find it inconvenient, and downright unacceptable, to have your favorite song take three to five minutes to stream each time you want to listen to it. But thanks to a German company named Fraunhofer-Gesellshaft and its inventors Bernhard Grill, Karl-Heinz Bradenburg, Thomas Sporer, Bernd Kurten, and Ernest Eberlein, that is no longer the case.

Karlheinz Brandenburg:
Christleches Medienmagazin pro

            In the early 1990’s many people still used cassette tapes and were being introduced to the CD player for all their instant music needs. But behind the scenes there was a new technology being developed that would forever change music. While we were now able to record crystal clear high quality digital sound onto CD’s, the files of music were still very large in consideration to how long songs were. What Karlheinz Brandenburg (often called the Father of the MP3) was working on was developing in the MP3, which would cut that footprint down by 12 times. MP3, aka Motion Pictures Expert Group Audio Layer 3 (we will stick with MP3), is technology that takes the original digital audio file and compresses it making it smaller with hardly any sound quality loss.     At first, MP3 was a near failure because the technology was before its time. It wasn’t until 1996 that it was copy-written in the US. By that time the internet was in full dial up swing. As MP3 files became more popular, so did file sharing. Now with music files taking a third of the time to download and taking 12 times less storage space, it made music very easy to access. Before Limewire and Napster, people would either copy and burn CD’s that their friends bought or record a song that was playing on the radio with a cassette (if you could get the timing right). But now, people were able to store millions of songs on their computers and share them with anyone who was connected to the internet. This caused earthquakes for the music industry. Artists were losing enormous amounts of money along with record labels and music producers. But in all reality, this is how MP3 really stayed relevant, and in turn, thrived.

            A year later in 1997 the first MP3 player was invented by MPMan. This was huge because you no longer had to carry around a bulky cd player that you could only carry in your pocket if you owned a pair of Jinko jeans. You could have access to hundreds of songs on a device that was just the size of your hand. Many companies made MP3 players from that time forward and the music industry scrambled to shut down the file share sites like Napster, Frostwire, and Limewire. But the granddaddy of them all made an appearance in 2001 when Apple introduced the Ipod and Itunes. By that time a lot of the illegal filesharing sites where on the downfall. Apple had revolutionized the music world.

MP3 revolutionized the way we access music in just 10 years thanks to some German inventors that never gave up, millions of American music pirates, and Apple. That is such a short time if you think about how long it took to get recorded music accessible to the masses. Thanks to this technology, along with advances in the internet and the data grid in America, we can now stream music on services like Spotify and Pandora from anywhere, often with no delay. What a time to be alive!