While it might seem a bit odd to be reading a blog about the end of a file format, MP3 files have had a huge impact in the tech and music industries that they are partly responsible for the early success of the Internet.
The MP3 file revolutionized the way that people listened to music. In the decade before that there had been a proliferation of portable devices that would play cassette tapes or CDs. But those devices did not really bring freedom to listen to music easily everywhere. I can remember the days when I’d have a pile of tapes or CDs in the car so that I could listen to my favorite music while I drove. But the MP3 file format meant that I could rip all of my music into digital files and could carry my whole music collection along with me.
And the MP3 digital files were small enough that people could easily share files with friends and could send music as attachments to emails. But file-sharing of MP3 files really took off in 1999 when Shawn Fanning, John Fanning, and Sean Parker launched the peer-to-peer network Napster. This service gave people access to the entire music collections of huge numbers of others. Napster was so popular that the traffic generated by the platform crashed broadband networks at colleges and caused havoc with many ISP networks.
In 2001 Apple launched iTunes, a service where people could legally download MP3 files. Apple used the MP3 format initially but in 2003 changed to the AAC format, probably mostly to avoid paying the MP3 licensing fees. Internet traffic to iTunes grew to be gigantic. It’s hard to remember when the Internet was so much smaller, but the transfer of MP3 files was as significant to Internet traffic in the early 2000s as Netflix is today.
Napster, along with Apple iTunes, revolutionized the music industry and the two are together credited with ending the age of albums. People started listening to their favorite songs and not to entire albums – and this was a huge change for the music industry. Album sales dropped precipitously and numerous music labels went out of business. I remember the day I cancelled my subscription to Columbia House because I no longer felt the need to buy CDs.
Of course, Napster quickly ran into trouble for helping people violate music copyrights and was driven out of business. But the genie was out of the bottle and the allure of sharing MP3 files was too tempting for music lovers. I remember musician friends who always had several large-capacity external hard drives in their car and would regularly swap music collections with others.
One of the consequences from ending the licensing of the MP3 format is that over time it’s likely that computers and other devices won’t be able to read the MP3 format any longer. MP3s are still popular enough that the music players on computers and smartphones all still recognize and play MP3 files. But the history of the Internet has shown us that unsupported formats eventually fizzle away into obscurity. For example, much of the programming behind the first web sites is no longer supported and many of today’s devices can no longer view old web sites without downloading software capable of opening the old files.
It’s interesting that most people think that once something has been digitized that it will last forever. That might be true for important data if somebody makes special effort to save the digitized files in a place that will keep them safe for a long time. Bu we’ve learned that digital storage media are not permanent. Old CDs become unreadable. Hard drives eventually stop working. And even when files are somehow kept, the software needed to run the files can fall into obscurity.
There are huge amounts of music since 2000 that has been created only in a digital format. Music by famous musicians will likely be maintained and replayed as long as people have an interest in those musicians. But music by lesser-known artists will probably fade away and much of it will disappear. It’s easy to envision that in a century or two that that most of the music we listen to today might have disappeared.
Of course there are the online music streaming services like Spotify that are maintaining huge libraries of music. But if we’ve learned anything in the digital age it’s that companies that make a living peddling digital content don’t themselves have a long shelf life. So we have to wonder what happens to these large libraries when Spotify and similar companies fade away or are replaced by something else.
