At the end of March, Apple had racked up 75 million sales in one year from its online music store. It shows that music lovers — albeit in the US — are starting to download music legally from the Internet and pay for it in the process. The challenge for the music industry and its technology partners now is to convince the 330 million users of file-sharing service Kazaa to switch to legitimate means of downloading music.
Reading about music downloads and the progress of iTunes got me thinking about how the digital music revolution started in the first place. It wasn’t with Apple or the recording industry, but with The Frauenhofer Institute and its audio scientists who gave MPEG 3 compression to the world. The idea was simple: Strip away the elements of the music track to the point just before the human ear could detect degradation and save space on a hard disk in the process by reducing the music file size.
The greatest success of MP3 was that it gave music lovers a file format to convert their CD music into a format that took up less hard disk space, was easier to manage and could easily be transferred to a high-capacity portable music player.
As a general rule, I don’t download music from the Internet — legally or illegally. I still purchase on music on a CD in the old-fashioned way. Like going to the cinema, it’s something I enjoy doing. Moving to digital downloads will take greater incentives than getting a track for the best part of a euro. I will need to be able to make significant savings over buying the music on CD and I will need to be able to access a comprehensive back catalogue — the music I could never find in a standard high street music retailer.
Right now, MP3 and digital music to me doesn’t mean downloads from the Internet. Rather it involves using software to convert or ‘rip’ my music CDs to MP3 playlists, which I can then transfer to a portable MP3 player which is 10Gbyte in size. Doing this allows me to hold my entire CD collection on one device that fits in the palm of my hand. I still can enjoy my CDs at home, but when I’m walking or travelling by bus, I can get full access to my entire music collection. It’s using a great technology to physically compress a CD collection that takes up a lot of space to fit on to a device that takes up considerably less.
Remember, Apple only set up the iTunes music store as a marketing device to sell more of its iPod portable music players. A digital music revolution is in full swing but it centres on MP3, the file management software and the portable hardware. At the moment, the online distribution services exist on the periphery of the technology user experience.
05/04/04
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