MP3 no more

It appears to me that MP3 is about to bow out and leave the stage. For the past five years or so it has been the true standard for digital music. Most of us knew that early on, way before Napster. The rest of the world was slow to catch on for some reason. But once Napster became national and interntional news people got the message. As with any marketplace, and especially the internet, wherever people gather there is money to be made.

Which is why MP3 will not last much longer for the preNapsterites.

Music of this format, that for a decade has been the only medium for internet music, will soon be sold at inflated prices and deflated quality and will be labled product. That won't sit well with the people who made MP3 popular to begin with. MP3 is to be used as a marketing tool for promoting hard copy music sales. I guess they think they can sell a sample of limited quality and entice consumers to spend a little more, and it's likely that a few people will. But some have pointed out that charging people to listen to advertizing does not make a good business model. In an era of internet advertizing when people actually get paid to view and hear commercials Pay Napster and the other music nets are not likely to turn much of a profit.

Comercialization does not necessarily destroy everything it touches, but in this case where MP3 has gone beyond free entertainment and into the realm of free information it will not easily be tamed by the media giants of cable TV and radio. Interestingly the companies that enable worldwide communication often find themselves at odds with the companies that depend on worldwide communication. They create an infrastructure for the media middlemen to use and then allow the consumers to communicate directly, indeed that is the master design of the World Wide Web. Not surprisingly the resellers of information cannot compete with individuals who freely distribute it.

So to be competetive they must not fall behind the times, they must integrate MP3 technology and use it themselves. For all its glits and glamour MP3 is not all it's cracked up to be. It really doesn't matter what format is used to transmit music around the world; any time something better arrives it will replace MP3. Non-lossy compressors and broadband technology will become cheaper and more numerous, making MP3 cliché if not obsolete. But people will not change their preferences until the music peddlers with their tired old laws make MP3 inconvient for the average person. By that time the computer geeks and audiophiles will already have a solution to fall back onto.

MP3 is part of the internet lexicon now, and its meaning is sure to change. For now it is a bridge between technology and pop culture, but as the times change MP3 will be called The End of the Begining. Free information is as addictive as any narcotic and MP3 is definitely a gateway drug. So when MP3 goes the way of the dodo bird it will not be forgotten.