How MP3 Changed the Music Industry

Page 1 of 11 How MP3 Changed The Music Industry! DMT412 Case Study Maximilian Crosby Performance Sound BA Hons Friday 13th June 2014 © Page 2 of 11 MP3 is a type of digital format. It’s without doubt the most popular and most used digital format on the planet. In this essay I will be talking about why that is and how it’s popularity has changed the way we listen to music. I’ll be talking about how it works, it’s history, why people choose MP3 over other digital formats, how it compares to other digital formats, why MP3 was invented in the ﬁrst place, the effect MP3 has had on the music industry and how we listen to music. I’ll also be talking about why we need digital formats to begin with.

What is MP3? MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer 3, more commonly referred to as MP3 is a lossy encoding format for digital audio. MP3 was designed purely for audio and was designed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3003. In short it’s a lossy digital format. All digital formats fall under either one of two categories.

Lossy or lossless. What I’m talking about here is the type of compression the digital format is using. Lossy data compression is a type of data encoding methods that uses inexact approximations for representing the content that has been encoded. Audio formats that fall under this category are MP3, AAC (Advanced Audio Coding), WMA (Windows Media

Audio) and Voribs. Lossless data compression is a type of data compression that allows the original data to be perfectly reconstructed by the compressed data. Audio formats the fall under this category are WAV (Waveform Audio File Format or WAVE), AIFF (Audio

Interchange File Format) and FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) http:// www.dummies.com/how-to/content/digital-audio-ﬁle-formats-lossy-and-lossless-code.html.

What are the Pro’s and Con’s of Lossy or Lossless compression? Well the point of Lossy compression is to make the size of any file as small as possible (reduce the amount of data) whilst preserving as much of the original content as possible. The difference between a WAV file and an MP3 file is incredible http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/guide/file- © Page 3 of 11 formats-and-compression/. A WAV file which uses lossless data compression on average is around 41.3 megabytes (10 megabytes per minuet) http://www.theaudioarchive.com/

TAA_Resources_File_Size.htm where as an MP3 which uses lossy data compression on average would be around 5.6 megabytes (1.4 megabytes per minuet) http:// www.audiomountain.com/tech/calculations/Calculations.html. Having a much smaller file size will defiantly benefit you in a lot of ways. For example if you have 16 Gigabytes worth of storage on a device you’d be able to fit around 387 WAV files on your device. If you were to use MP3 though you’d be able to fit 2,857 files! This is one of the biggest reasons

MP3 became so popular when it was released.

Everybody was now about to fit nearly 10x more songs on there portable devices which made the first iPod and other portable music players viable. Without MP3 files we’d have had to wait at least another couple of years before any digital portable devices were released simply because there wouldn’t have been enough storage space. The first generation iPod was released with 5.10 Gigabytes of space with a very big price tag as it was very high end hardware at the time http://ipod.about.com/od/ understandingipodmodels/g/1st_gen_ipod.htm. That’s only 123 WAV files compared to 910

MP3 ﬁles. For the general public using MP3 ﬁles was a no-brainer. Steve Jobs, CEO at

Apple Computer claimed you could ﬁt more than 1,000 MP3’s on the 5.10 Gigabytes of space https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYMTy6fchiQ which was true at the time as

MP3’s had even less bits per second than nowadays which means MP3’s had an even smaller ﬁle size.

What lossless data compression has on its side is simply the quality of audio it can provide. With lossless audio ﬁles the minimal amount of data is lost giving the listener the

A good example to compare the two is this. Imagine a digital picture straight from the camera. Everything is crisp, sharp and clear but the ﬁle size is huge so you want to compress the ﬁle for storage. The more you compress the image the more data you’re taking away from the picture and the more data you take away from the picture the less clear it becomes. Suddenly everything gets a little less sharp and the picture starts to look like it’s pixelated. That’s exactly what’s happening to your audio. It’s still the same picture just not as clear. http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/46335/lossy-compression

How does MP3 compare to other ﬁle formats? MP3’s main competition is AAC (Advanced

Audio Coding). AAC was released two years later than MP3 in 1997 by AT&T Bell

Laboratories, Dolby, Sony and Nokia. AAC was designed to be the successor to MP3 with more sample frequencies. AAC has a range of 8 to 96Khz where as MP3 has 16 to 48Khz. the ﬁle format can support up to 48 channels where as MPEG-1 can only support 2 and

MPEG-2 can only support up to 5.1 surround sound. AAC contains a much more efficient and simpler filter bank, higher coding efficiency for stationary signals, Higher coding accuracy for transient signals. AAC is also much better at handling/compressing frequencies above 16Khz. It has all these advantages by why is AAC still not as popular at

MP3? Well these advantages do have a consequence. The typical file size of an AAC file for a 4 minuet song is around 2 megabytes more than MP3. So a bigger file size but not by much. Also, MP3 is so dominating, widely used and standardised that it’s difficult to implement or introduce a new file type to take its place. To make it even worse, on average the general public don’t really care about that little extra quality so nobody bothers to use

AAC and sticks with the standard MP3. One of the biggest reasons AAC is so popular is

© Page 5 of 11 that Apple Computer opted to use AAC as there standard ﬁle format in there music distribution software iTunes which quickly grew to be a massive asset to the music industry. iTunes became famous and with it, AAC. http://ipod.about.com/u/ua/ advanceditunesuse/acc-mp3-better.htm

Both MP3 and AAC are lossy ﬁle formats. But what of the lossless ﬁle formats WAV and

AIFF? WAV (Waveform Audio File Format or WAVE) was created and released by

Microsoft and IBM in 1991. WAV one of the very ﬁrst digital audio ﬁle formats available on

Microsoft’s and IBM’s Computer systems. As Microsoft’s and IBM’s computers were increasing in power and as Apple Computer release their audio file format AIFF it became apparent that the two companies needed to respond to Apple’s audio file format. A massive gap in the market had emerged and it needed to be filled fast. The two companies needed to create a competitive lossless audio file format to compete with Apple Computer.

Thus WAV was born. WAV ﬁles are huge though. Around 10 megabytes per minuet of audio. At the time of WAV’s release Windows based computers dominated the market and with the computers, so did WAV. It still remains today the most used lossless ﬁle format.

AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format) was created by Apple Computer in 1988 to complement there new Operating System Mac OS X. AIFF was the first widely known lossless file format and defiantly aided the sails of Apple computers at the time. WAV and

AIFF fall under an entirely different category than lossy ﬁle formats though. WAV and AIFF are the highest quality ﬁle formats but they will take up a lot of space on your hard drive.

They have a completely different purpose. Lossy ﬁle formats to the opposite to that. They try to make there ﬁle size as small as possible whilst try to conserve as much of the original audio as possible. http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/WAV

Finalised in 1992, and published in 1993. Backwards compatible with MPEG 2 Audio

(MPEG 2 part 3) with additional bit rates and sample rates was published in 1995.

MP3 and other lossy ﬁle formats take advantage of perceptual limitation of human hearing called Auditory Masking https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~bosse/proj/node9.html. In 1894 an american physicist called Alfred M. Mayer http://www.nasonline.org/publications/ biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/mayer-alfred.pdf reported that a tone could be rendered inaudible by another tone of lower frequency. In 1959 Richard Ehmer proved this theory and described a complete set of auditory curves regarding this phenomenon. After a short amount of time Ernst Terhardt http://www.mmk.e-technik.tu-muenchen.de/persons/ ter.html created an algorithm describing auditory masking with high accuracy.

The Phychoacoustic Masking Codec http://www.music.miami.edu/programs/mue/research/ mescobar/thesis/web/Psychoacoustics.htm was proposed in 1979 independently by

Manfred R. Schroeder and M. A. Krasner. Manfred Schroeder was already a world renowned acoustical and electrical engineer http://asa.aip.org/encomia/gold/ schroeder.html but what he was proposing did not go down well as it described negative results due to the nature of speech and the Linear Predictive Coding (LPC) http:// support.ircam.fr/docs/AudioSculpt/3.0/co/LPC.html LPC is mostly used in Audio Signal

Processing and Speech Processing.

Optimum coding in the frequency domain (OCF) and Perceptual Transform Coding

(PXFM) http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Johns88-audiocoding.pdf which are

MP3’s predecessors along with block-switching contributions from Thomson-Brandt were

© Page 7 of 11 merged into a codec called ASPEC which was then submitted to MPEG. ASPEC was the best codec to its opponents when it comes to quality but was rejected as too complex to implement. The song “Tom’s Diner “ by Suzanne Vega https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=mNWyF3iSMzs&feature=kp was the song used by Karlheinz Brandenburg (Focusing on how people perceive music, he completed his doctoral work in 1989) to develop the MP3 http://internethalloffame.org/inductees/karlheinz-brandenburg.

In 1991 there were only two proposals that MPEG could assess. Musicam (Masking pattern adapted Universal Subband Integrated Coding And Multiplexing) http:// www.musicamusa.com/index1.htm and ASPEC (Adaptive Spectral Perceptual Entropy

Coding) http://publica.fraunhofer.de/dokumente/PX-43560.html. MPEG opted for the

Musicam technique for its simplicity and stability. Much of its technology and and ideas were incorporated into the deﬁnition of ISO MPEG Audio Layer 1 and Layer 2 and the ﬁlter bank alone into Layer 3 (MP3). Leon van de Kerkhof (The Netherlands), Gerhard Stoll

(Germany), Leonardo Chiariglione (Italy), Yves-François Dehery (France), Karlheinz

Brandenburg (Germany) and James D. Johnston (USA) took ideas from ASPEC and incorporated there ideas into MP3 which was designed to achieve the same quality at 128

Kbit/s as MP2 at 192 Kbit/s. MPEG made some adaptations to the second suite of MPEG standards in 1994.

A simulation of the software written in C language by the ISO MPEG Audio committee was produced in 1991-1996 in order to produce bit compliant MPEG Audio ﬁles. It was approved as a draft technical report in November 1994, ﬁnalised in 1996 and published as international standard. http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/standards/mpeg-1/audio

90’s. Around this time ﬁle sharing over the internet was becoming very popular in its self.

Again using a lossy ﬁle type was a no-brainer for transferring audio over the internet because of its ﬁle size and since AAC wasn’t around until 1997, was only available on

Apple computers for a time and was nowhere near as popular MP3, MP3 was the obvious choice for the general public at that time. Sharing music had never been easier legally and illegally. Maybe a little too easy. Never mind having to go to your local music retailer, everybody was suddenly simply getting there favourite songs straight from the internet.

Then ones you have your favourite songs on MP3 you can put them on all of your portable devices and listen to them on the go. No need for a portable CD player anymore.

Not many people can tell the difference between an MP3 and a lossless file. Not on headphones/earphones anyway. Which is why 99% of people don’t care that they’re losing that extra quality. Most people would rather be able to fit more songs on there portable devices rather than having high quality audio files. In short, the ease of retrieval, small file size which means fast downloads/uploads and being able to fit more songs on a device, ease of downloading an MP3 for free/illegally and the fact that all of this can be done sat at home are the main reasons MP3 was, is and will continue to be so popular.

What effect did MP3 files have on the music industry? At first MP3 files seemed like a fantastic asset to the music industry. MP3’s small file size meant that selling music over the internet was viable. 600 megabyte albums in WAV format in those days would have taken a ridiculously long time to download. When MP3 came out suddenly selling albums and singles over the internet was viable. 600 megabyte albums were now 50-80 megabytes and the fact that people could simply click “buy” on there home computers rather than having to go to there local music retailer meant that the music industry was appealing to an entirely new demographic of people. Easy money.

Sadly that wasn’t the case. Yes this was all true but most people found it so easy to get there hands on there favourite music for free and illegally that they did exactly that http:// www.soc.duke.edu/~s142tm01/piracyfaq.html. thousands of people and companies are being sued for releasing music for free but it’s not enough. Suddenly sales in music retail shops plummets http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/04/business/damages-ruling-expected- in-mp3-case.html. It’s now even harder for professional musicians to have a sustainable income because nobody is actually buying any music. Last but not least everybody is now listening to MP3 ﬁles! Very few people are now going to shops and buying high quality

WAV CD’s so now all the music around the world sound a little worse.

A good example is a company/software called Napster http://www.napster.co.uk/start.

Shortly after MP3’s were released, In November 1998. Napster also known as Shawn

Fanning http://www.crunchbase.com/person/shawn-fanning, A respected programmer and hacker starts communicating his idea to his fellow friends and teenagers. The idea is a global internet community, with access to every music file on every hard drive, everywhere. In those days, to transfer a single music file takes hours, often without success. After 6 months of labor Napster succeeds in coding the application and then simply uploads it to the internet. Napster was a big influence in supposedly legal MP3 sharing. Shawn Fanning claimed Napster was Legal under an exception in copyright law called fair use. He claimed he’d done nothing wrong as Napster had met all the requirements of copyright law and that he was “fully compliant with the Digital Millennium

Copyright Act” (DMCA). This is because “Napster has never actually come into contact with the music that people are distributing.” https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=kSZqkn9hT5w Put simply, Napster has never stored any of the ﬁles that are being shared so how could they be violating copyright law? In the end Napster was taken to

© Page 10 of 11 court. Thanks to the publicity of the ﬁasco Napster received an inﬂux of users downloading even more MP3’s which generated even more revenue which allowed Napster to simply buy the companies that are suing them! In the end Napster was taken to the supreme court and was forced to shut down. This is just one of many softwares that distributed or allowed people to share MP3’s for free and illegally.

Nowadays the distribution of MP3’s over the internet is well managed. A lot more people are downloading music using different softwares and websites. Without a doubt he main contributor to the distribution of legal lossy audio ﬁles is Apple’s iTunes https:// www.apple.com/uk/itunes/. iTunes simply makes you pay for every audio ﬁle you download. Apple takes a cut of the sale and the rest goes to the royalty owners.

Everybody’s happy. I say lossy audio ﬁles because they’re using the AAC ﬁle format.

Thanks to iTunes AAC has become increasingly popular but still the MP3 remains by far the dominating ﬁle format. There are now some services that allow you to simply listen/ stream your music for free straight from there software/website. For example Spotify https://www.spotify.com/uk/ and Grooveshark http://grooveshark.com/. These companies make there money from advertisements. Then they take a cut of the revenue and the rest goes to the royalty holders. Everybody’s happy.

Even though the music industry is now making money from MP3 and AAC ﬁle formats the industry is still suffering. The fact that money is now being made from MP3 and AAC ﬁle formats doesn’t solve the issue that nobody is going to music retail shops anymore. Before

MP3 music shops were by far the biggest source of income for the music industry and because it’s physical material the proﬁt margin was typically larger. Yes more music is being sold but at a smaller price with a much smaller proﬁt margin. Also because most people are now sat at home purchasing music rather than in shops nobody is purchasing

© Page 11 of 11 merchandise which means a whole other aspect of the music industry is virtually inexistent. This problem has forced huge companies like HMV to downsize in a massive scale http://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/hmv-announce-37-more-store- closures/ and independent music retailers to simply close up shop.

Indirectly MP3 has not only damaged the music industry but many people feel it has taken away some of the culture as well. A lot of people think walking into a music retailer was something special. The fact that you could pick up an album and look at all the artwork before you purchased it gave a whole other experience. Having your own physical CD/

Record collection was in most peoples opinion much better than having a library of MP3’s on a computer. Music retailer shops were all part of the music experience. MP3 has indirectly liquidated that and a lot of people hate MP3 for that fact. MP3 has damaged the music industry in a big way but slowly the industry is recovering now that illegal MP3 trading/piracy has been stabilised.