How Music Got Free

How Music Got Free takes you on the wild ride of the mp3 file format, explaining how it began, what the internet had to do with its popularity, and why it’s future is looking very uncertain.

Believe it or not, the development of the mp3 format actually began in 1987. German scientists at Fraunhofer Institute worked for years to find a way to compress audio files in a way that would sound indistinguishable from CD, which was a monumental challenge. Once they got it right, they sent it to the Moving Pictures Expert Groups, or MPEG, who approved of their format, known as mp3, as a technology standard.

Little did they know, they had also accepted their rival, who would be known as mp2. Thus began a long battle between the two. Mp2 had the advantage of support from Phillips, so they became the preferred format for CDs, digital audiotapes, and FM-radio. The MPEG neglected to assign anything to mp3 and it seemed like they had lost the battle.

But soon the ever-improving mp3 format gathered steam when it continually came out on top in head-to-head comparisons with mp2. However, everything almost ended for mp3 when DVDs began to use the mp2 format.

The Fraunhofer team stuck it out a little longer and had an unexpected win for mp3. They managed to land a deal with the National Hockey League (NHL) to install mp3 conversion boxes in every North American stadium. This small win was enough to give them the financial push to keep going.

The NHL deal gave mp3 makers what they needed to survive for a little longer, and they pushed forward. All they needed was for people to realize what they had was better.

In 1995, in a bold and unexpected move, Fraunhofer decided to give away their mp3 converting software for free. They called it WinPlay3. Unbeknownst to them, this would mark the beginning of a music-pirating revolution.

Soon, everyone’s preferred format became mp3, as they could rip off songs from their CDs and share them all over the internet. And it became easier and easier as broadband spread across the world. Music piracy was spreading like wildfire, thanks to how easy it became with mp3.

When the Fraunhofer team became aware of this problem, they offered the music industry a copy-protected version of the mp3, but no one was interested.

Within two years, mp3 won, and it was everywhere on the internet. And with this, piracy became commonplace. Witt says that music piracy in the late ‘90s was what drug experimentation was to the late ‘60s.

It was a generation-wide flouting of laws and norms without even considering consequences. Music was forever, irreversibly changed.