Sweet music for those who invented the MP3 player
Digital players of all kinds happily shared the market. The advent of the MP3 player probably brought many of its sales figures to an abrupt halt, as the latter device had more capacity to fit in the palm of the hand or in the pocket.
Its story began with the digital audio industry’s need for music compression. Courtesy of the Motion Pictures Expert Group, they came up with a format called MPEG Audio Layer 3. Aptly concatenated to MP3, this format rose to worldwide fame as audio files became many times smaller than their original uncompressed versions. Known as the infamous five who invented the MP3 player, Karl-Heinz Brandenburg, Ernst Eberlein, Bernhard Grill, Bernd Kurten, and Thomas Sporer hailed from Germany. Accredited with the patent, they carried out their research work at the Fraunhofer Insitut. Although his name was not mentioned in the inventors’ patent, Dieter Seitzer was duly credited for his help with audio encoding.
There were many obstacles in the initial stage. Failure after failure to come up with a working digital player almost brought work to a halt. Finally in 1989, the group tasted sweet success. The initial market was primarily in the music and research community, as their need for file compression was greater than that of other groups. In the mid 90’s the market extended to home users who happily traded in their audio cassettes and CDs for the more portable player. Sharing of music files over the Internet became extremely popular, sometimes to the detriment of producers and artists in terms of copyrights and royalties.
In the late 1990s, a South Korean company became the first of many to invent the MP3 player for portable use. Effective immediately, takeout music became the next thing after the ice cream cone. Although there were some problems with the formula, it wasn’t long before this device became a must-have for most common men.
