The MP3 Is Officially Dead, According To Its Creators
May 11, 2017 12:25 PM ET
Andrew Flanagan.
A 2003 display for the iTunes Music Store ushers in a new age for the
music business, shortly after its introduction. The iPod helped turn
around
Apple's fortunes and brand identity, while the creators of the MP3 had
regarded a portable player as a mere storage device.
"The death of the MP3 was announced in a conference room in Erlangen,
Germany, in the spring of 1995."
So opens Stephen Witt's How Music Got Free, an investigation into the
forced digitization and subsequent decimation of the music business, from
which
it has only very recently started to recover. That ironic conference room
eulogy actually took place just before the compression algorithm caught on
(don't worry, we'll explain in a bit). Soon, the MP3 not only upended the
recording industry but, thanks to the iPod, also contributed to Apple's
late-'90s transformation into one of the most successful companies in
history.
(On Tuesday, the tech giant passed $800 billion in market capitalization,
the first U.S. company to do so.)
But now, 22 years later, the MP3 truly is dead, according to the people
who invented it. The Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, a
division
of the state-funded German research institution that bankrolled the MP3's
development in the late '80s, recently announced that its "licensing
program for certain MP3 related patents and software of Technicolor and
Fraunhofer IIS has been terminated."
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The MP3: A History Of Innovation And Betrayal
The Record
The MP3: A History Of Innovation And Betrayal
Bernhard Grill, director of that Fraunhofer division and one of the
principals in the development of the MP3, told NPR over email that
another audio
format, AAC — or "Advanced Audio Coding," which his organization also
helped create — is now the "de facto standard for music download and
videos on
mobile phones." He said AAC is "more efficient than MP3 and offers a lot
more functionality."
As Witt illustrates throughout his excellent opening chapters, the MP3,
before upending the musical world as we knew it, almost died in the
research
lab. The team of engineers that invented the format was attempting to
make
it possible to send audio over telephone lines, which could only transmit
small amounts of data. Fraunhofer — in competing for the legitimacy it
needed to persuade tech companies to actually use MP3s, and so actually
make
money — hit numerous speed bumps. It was repeatedly beleaguered by clever
corporate sabotage and later by piracy. Other failures hinged on the need
for
the world to catch up with the technology's possibilities: Along the way,
one computer engineer on the team had a patent for a music streaming
service
denied by the German government because it was technologically absurd at
the time. Another innovation the team failed to leverage? The portable
MP3
player.
In early 1995, the format was on life support, with one licensing deal
being the use of the technology by hockey arenas across the U.S. (That
spring
meeting in which the MP3 was declared dead came months later, after
another
failed pitch that denied it being standardized and widely adopted.) A
little later, Fraunhofer began giving away the software that consumers
needed
to turn compact discs into MP3s at home. The rest is recent history.
So is it the end of an era? We may still use MP3s, but when the people
who
spent the better part of a decade creating it say the jig is up, we
should
probably start paying attention. AAC is indeed much better — it's the
default setting for bringing CDs into iTunes now — and other formats are
even
better than it, though they also take up mountains of space on our hard
drives.
And it's not just that more efficient and complete ways of storing music
have been developed. There was a deeper problem. The engineers who
developed
the MP3 were working with incomplete information about how our brains
process sonic information, and so the MP3 itself was working on false
assumptions about how holistically we hear. As psychoacoustic research has
evolved,
so has the technology that we use to listen. New audio formats and
products, with richer information and that better address mobile music
streaming,
are arriving.
Deezer, a music streaming company relatively popular in its native
France,
launched in the U.S. offering "high-resolution" streaming, for double the
price of a Spotify account. Tidal did the same. Neil Young tried his hand
with the hotly tipped Pono. While all three are not exactly taking over
the
world — Pono, in fact, is officially dead, rebranded "Xstream" — the
record
business has put its stamp of approval on the idea, at least. "Master
Quality Authenticated" is a promising new technology that uses a type of
audio
origami to spare cellular data when necessary and to "bloom" in quality
when it's not — though it has drawn pointed criticism for being a closed
loop
that allows for recording industry cash-ins. It wouldn't be the first
time.
The formats that convey art and media to us also delineate that media;
vinyl records require a session-interrupting flip, which The Beatles
brilliantly exploited by creating an infinite loop of gibberish at the
end of Sgt.
Pepper's second side. The VHS tape in both image and sound was as soft
and
fuzzy as a worn teddy bear, while new high-definition televisions render
images perhaps too robotically, tracking movement like T-1000. The MP3,
as
mentioned, enabled millions or billions of song listens, just with
incorrect
biological assumptions. The lesson seems to be, simply, that our media
will
always be as exactly imperfect as we are.
_______________________________________________
ATI (Adaptive Technology Inc.)
A special interest affiliate of the Missouri Council of the Blind
http://moblind.org/membership/affiliates/adaptive_technology
