Your MP3s are going to be just fine
LET US now praise old music file formats, and the music cultures that begat us.
The Internet is currently spilling many pixels over the fact that the MP3, the music file used on the original iPod, has been abandoned by its inventors at the Fraunhofer Institute.
The German organisation, a division of the group that helped develop the MP3, is letting its licensing hold on the format expire. The group is also responsible for the MP3’s successor, the AAC file format used widely by services such as iTunes.
But the “death” of the MP3 is really not much of a death at all. The files will not spontaneously combust. You’ll still be able to buy and use MP3s. They will not suddenly stop playing.
It wasn’t just about the equipment we used to enjoy our music that changed with the MP3, though the MP3 hastened the abandonment of many a Walkman and Discman. The MP3 let mix tapes give way to playlists. Albums, and the order in which artists laid out their songs, didn’t matter quite as much. You could carry thousands of songs with you at all times.
The MP3 radically changed how the music industry made money. But the MP3 fell out of favour with companies steadily through the 2000s. The iTunes store adopted the AAC standard in 2003. In 2014, Amazon MP3 was rebranded as Amazon Music. As streaming picked up steam, so did newer formats.
Still, even with streaming, you can still see how the idea toward music that the MP3 kick-started shaped the value proposition that we still see today: that it should be cheap, flexible and plentiful.
So, all that’s really happened to the MP3 is that the Frauenhofer Institute has said that it’s ready to move on, let its patents expire and relinquish its licences. That’s certainly not a death knell. In fact, having the licensing of a file format expire can be liberating. The company that made the GIF gave up its licensing in 2006, and we all know those have only gotten stronger.
It’s hard to say what, if anything, will happen to the MP3 now. While it was a revolutionary in its day for compressing music without losing too much of the sound, it certainly isn’t the best audio format out there today. The licensing decision doesn’t kill it, but it does give us a good moment to stop and think about how much the file changed the way music fits into our culture. — Washington Post