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A format for recording near cd- quality music.
Short for mpeg1 Layer 3, an mp3 file is a music track that has
been encoded and compressed for electronic distribution or storage. Mp3's
great trick is to squeeze musical recording into less than 10% of the space
it would occupy if recorded in a standard format such as windows wav. Thus a
four-minute song, which as a wav file might might occupy 50 megabytes
of disk space, uses only 4 megabytes in its mp3 form. This highly
efficient compression has made mp3 the format of choice for music
pirates, who can record and distribute entire cds across the internet
quickly and efficiently. Many newsgroups and websites are
devoted to the dissemination of illegally recorded music, and the phenomenon
has spawned a new generation of inexpensive hardware devices capable of
storing and playing dozens of mp3 tracks.
Mp3 files
are especially popular with students, most of whom have free high-speed
access to the internet, but it is increasingly popular with the general
public too. Forrester, a research company, estimated that 35m Europeans have
downloaded music from the internet, about one-third of the online
population. Estimates of the cost of mp3 piracy vary, but in a 2000
study in the United States by SoundScan, a music industry data gatherer,
showed a drop of 4% in music sales within five miles of university campuses,
in stores that historically account for 50% of all offline music sales. The
Recording Industry Association of America (riaa) claimed that online music
piracy resulted in a 10% drop in music sales in 2001, a result of 235 of
music consumers downloading files rather than paying for cds.
The big labels reacted to the threat by refusing to allow artists
to distribute their music electronically and cracking down on allegedly
illicit mp3 distribution services such as the ingenious napster.
A consortium of companies from the music and computer industries formed the
Secure Digital Music Initiative (sdmi) in late 1998, with the aim of
creating software and hardware-based encryption technologies that
would make the illicit copying and distribution of music impossible. But
their efforts to put this genie back in its bottle are being undermined by
the sheer weight of support for mp3 and a new generation of music
companies running mp3-based distribution services from their
websites.
Although the record companies have had one highly visible success
in closing down the Napster music exchange network, the number of people
using comparable system such as gnutella is growing rapidly. at the
same time, crackers have made a mockery of the sdmi
technology, throwing the music industry's attempts to create new online
music standards into confusions and forcing sdmi into hiatus. Many
experts, including a group of Microsoft researchers, believe that
mp3 file sharing will always be impossible to prevent, citing the growth
of consumer access to broadband connections and the corresponding increase
in the number of available sources for music as insurmountable barriers for
the music industry. |
