FAQ: MP3: New Music Technology

Or… The Web Meets Music and the Music Industry Becomes Road Kill

Some of you may have heard of something called MP3. You may have noticed the music industry's recent attempts to stop this. MP3 is spreading very fast, it offers a technically superior solution to storing, distributing, and playing music, and it's free. MP3 may well kill the music industry.

MP3 is a compression format. Since current recorded music is digital, that is, it's numbers, a formula can compress the numbers into smaller numbers to reduce the storage size of the information. Upon playback, the formula decompresses the numbers and you hear the music.

A music CD currently holds only an hour of music. MP3 allows you to put up to ten hours of music on a CD.

The MP3 format was stolen from a research site and is now widely available. It's fairly easy to copy music from your CD into your computer and then compress the songs.

Using GeoCities, Tripod, and many of the other free web sites, fans set up web pages and offer their favorite tunes. They then announce the site's address at several of the popular MP3 search engines. For several hours, fans from around the planet download the songs. Until the music industry spots the site and GeoCities shuts it down. But fans just do this again at another site. They can create ten sites in a few minutes, and when one is shut down, they open the next one. It's free.

I used Altavista to search for *.MP3 and found over 1.3 million songs. Practically everything has been compressed by dedicated fans. There are thousands of fan web sites for each major musician.

Fans also set up secret web pages which can't be found by search engines. They then pass the location to each other by email.

With CD recorders (about $200) and blank CDs (buy in bulk for less than fifty cents each), you can make a CD that holds up to ten hours of your favorite music. It's annoying to pay $15 for a CD to buy just the one good song.

People are beginning to use their computers as stereos: a ten gigabyte hard disk costs about $200 and can hold about 150 CDs. One can use an old PC for this.

With MP3, you don't need CDs anymore. There's a digital Walkman called the Rio. It's made of RAM chips (with 64 MB of RAM,) and plays about five hours of music. Plug it into your computer, load it with your favorite songs, unplug it, and carry it around with you all day. Tomorrow, just erase the songs and add new ones from your computer. The Rio is chips, which means shake it as hard as you like (heck, bang it on the table!): no skipping.

Many musicians are happy about MP3. They can bypass the record labels and record stores altogether and keep 100% of the money for themselves. The Backstreet Boys could set up a web site with e-commerce and sell their songs directly from their web site. Not a penny to agents or the record industry. Music groups can promote their own music directly to the fans, and listeners buy just the songs they want to hear, and the musicians get every penny. Billy Idol recently released a song in MP3, other major muscians are following.

If you or your friends have your own band, you can fetch free software (listed below) that lets you convert your music from CD to MP3. You can then set up e-commerce sites and sell your own music directly to your listeners or you can offer free samples of your songs.

The music industry is in screaming terror. MP3 means a collapse in CD sales, royalties, and radio station airplay royalties. It will kill the record labels, such as Sony, and the record stores, such as Tower. The music industry recently filed a suit in federal court to ban the Rio. The judge threw out the suit and sales continue. College students have stopped buying CDs, they have thousands of songs on their university servers. Instead of a stereo system, they use an old computer for music playback.

The industry recently announced that they would offer their own technology. They're going to learn a lesson: the users, not the industry, decide which technology it wants. No matter what the industry releases, MP3 is already available, it's widespread, it's free, and there are over a million songs already on the web. A recording studio executive will need a kilo of cocaine to explain to a musician why the musician should let the studio keep 90% of the sales on a CD. In other words, the music industry can't make MP3 disappear. And there's absolutely nothing they can do about it.

Converting Songs Into MP3

A good site for all things MP3 is www.mp3.com or www.mp3now.com. Find more information, software, search engines, Rio players, etc.

If you just want to listen, use search engines devoted to MP3, such as:

• The Borg
• Kermit
• 123MP3

The best sites are secret, so ask hardcore fans for sites or MP3 songs.

You can convert your own CD music to MP3. This is a two-step process.

1. First step uses ripper software to move the music from the CD to the hard disk in WAV format. You can then play WAV files. There are a number of rippers on the net. There are free versions: CD-EX or CD-EX and AudioGrabber. Find more rippers at http://www.mp3now.com/html/cd_rippers.html (these are faster, etc.)
2. The second step uses an encoder to compress the WAV file into MP3 format. A free encoder is BladeEnc (it can take two or more hours to convert one song, but hey, it's free.) The result is a file in MP3 format which is much smaller in kilobyte size. There are faster encoders.

Once your song is in MP3 format, you can play it on a Rio playback device, put dozens of hours of music on an unused computer, send copies of your garage band's songs to your friends, or set up a web site with e-commerce and sell your band's music.

Your up-to-date computer can probably play MP3 music already. But the MP3 players are very cool: set up, save, and play your own playlists, manage your 900 songs, etc. Try WinAmp.

You can customize your MP3 player's look by changing its skin. Thousands of fans create new skins and distribute them for free.

So…

So try it. Now. It's totally cool. A simple technology offers a better solution. Remember back in the old days when you wrote letters with a pen and now you use e-mail? No more stamps. MP3 totally changes music. Music becomes easier to play. Fetch music off the web. Easily swap music with friends over e-mail for free. Rio holds up to five hours of CD-quality music with no skipping. Mix and match up to ten hours of your favorite songs on a CD that costs less than a dollar (that amount of music costs $150+ on old-fashion CDs.) MP3 wipes out a stale industry and creates a whole new way of distributing and playing music.

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