MP3 is the format that revolutionised the way we consumer and steal music since the early 1990’s. MP3 format has now been officially retired. The German institution that created the MP3 format has announced that it has terminated licensing for certain MP3-related patents. In much simpler words, life support has been turned off forever for MP3. The institution believes that are better wats to store music in 2017.
In its place, the director of the Institute told said that the Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format has become the "new standard for music download and videos on mobile phones." It's simply more efficient and has greater functionality, as streaming TV and radio broadcasting use the format to deliver higher-quality audio at lower bitrates than MP3.
According to Stephen Witt's book How Music Got Free, corporate sabotage and and other failures almost stonewalled the MP3 into irrelevancy. Finally, Fraunhofer just started giving away software consumers could use to rip songs from compact discs to MP3 files on their home computer, after which the format took off.
By the early 2000’s, however, those tiny files were zipping around the nascent internet, spawning a gold rush of digital piracy. It ruled illegal sharing for years as sites like Napster and Kazaa hosted popular peer-to-peer services allowing folks to download songs with a click.
Apple's iTunes store dominated that market, which funneled music into their answer to the MP3 player market, the iPod. Apple gave users the option of using AAC almost from the start, and that format has proven the eventual successor. But MP3 deserves its place in history for enabling casual users to experience for the first time the internet's true potential for exchanging data.
- Andrew
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