THE MP3 was left for dead in 1995 by the industry that it eventually upended. The audio format was developed by a German team lead by Karlheinz Brandenburg and built on decades of research on an esoteric field called psychoacoustics—the study of how humans perceive sound.
It was released at the height of CDs’ popularity. Computer engineer Dieter Seitzer, Brandenburg’s thesis adviser, thought the CD format “a ridiculous exercise in overkill,” according to the book “How Music Got Free” by Stephen Witt.
Seitzer said most of the data in the music CD could be discarded because these were beyond human perception. The human ear, he said, did not act like an electronic device that was capable of perceiving everything, but an adaptive organ that evolution tweaked into hearing language and serving as “early warning system against enormous carnivorous cats.”
Brandenburg and his team came up with the MP3 standard after years of research. They shrunk the music file’s size to 1/12 that of a CD audio and without perceptible degradation in quality. They did this by compressing the music file using an algorithm that took into account how humans perceived sound— trimming it of those beyond hearing.
The mp3 offered quality encoding at smaller file sizes. You’d think the recording world would have immediately embraced it for the technology marvel that it was. Instead, it was rejected. The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), which sets the audio and video standards, favored the MP2 format offered by a group that included Philips, a co-inventor of the compact disc.
In head-to-head comparisons, the MP3 beat the MP2 by a wide margin. Politics, however, made sure the MP2 beat the MP3 in standardization contests and adoption. The MP3 managed to stay alive when it was picked up to broadcast games by the National Hockey League. From there, it was picked up by other sports events.
MP3’s popularity exploded, however, when the Internet went mainstream and people started to share music tracks. CD files were huge, too large for the limited bandwidth then available. MP3 files, on the other hand, were much smaller and entire albums could be shared online quickly and easily.
Brandenburg told the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) that the best way to get ahead of the then-nascent MP3 files-based music piracy was to offer a legal option. He presented a copy-protectable MP3. The RIAA rejected his proposal.
Witt’s book is a fascinating and insightful narrative of how the recording industry plummeted when “music got free,” when people stopped buying CDs and music altogether and started downloading and sharing files online using such technologies as Napster, Bittorrent, and eventually streaming.
A key storyline in the book is that of the RNS or Rabid Neurosis, the top leaker of music albums for a decade starting in 1996. The Federal Bureau of Investigation said it leaked 20,000 albums in 11 years. One of the group’s members was Bennie Lydell Glover, who worked in a CD manufacturing plant in North Carolina. Glover set up a system that had people smuggle CDs they were pressing out of the plant and for him to encode and share with the RNS leader, who would then distribute it publicly on the Internet. They would often release an album two weeks ahead of its official launch. Glover would eventually leak close to 2,000 CDs. The group, however, ultimately disbanded and its members got charged by the FBI.
Witt’s book is a good read. It is an informative look into how technology can disrupt a seemingly unassailable industry.
(max@limpag.com)