Music listening in 2019: 10 takeaways from the IFPI’s new report

Global music-industry body the IFPI has published its latest ‘Music Listening’ report, for 2019, based on a survey of 34,000 people in 21 countries.
Whereas the body’s annual Global Music Report focuses on revenues, this study is all about people’s music habits: how much they’re streaming and buying music; what devices they’re doing it on; and whether they’re still getting it from unlicensed sources at least some of the time.
The survey was conducted in April and May this year by the IFPI and its research partner AudienceNet. The 21 countries were: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as China and India – although results from the latter two were not included in the IFPI’s ‘global’ figures in the report. Here are Music Ally’s 10 key takeaways from Music Listening 2019, which we’ve been reading overnight.

1. Surprise! Music-streaming is growing!

Okay, not really a surprise. On average, people are spending around 18 hours a week listening to music, up from 17.8 hours a year ago. It’s clear that streaming is driving this. 89% of respondents now use some kind of on-demand streaming service, while 64% listened to music through audio-streaming services in the last month. The latter stat is up from 57% a year ago.

2. It’s not just about the youngsters

This is a point that the IFPI stresses in the report. It’s true that young people are the keenest streamers: 83% of 16-24 year-olds used audio-streaming services in the last month, and 63% in the last day. Meanwhile, 52% of them report having used paid streaming services in the last month – the highest percentage for any age bracket.
But the highest rate of growth for use of streaming services comes from 35-64 year-olds: 64% of 35-44 year-olds, 53% of 45-54 year-olds and 44% of 55-64 year-olds used audio-streaming services in the last month, up by nine, eight and nine percentage points respectively.

3. Video is the biggest music-streaming format

That ‘value gap’ argument about whether the music industry should be getting more money from YouTube isn’t going away anytime soon. The IFPI’s study claims that video accounts for 47% of on-demand streaming consumption globally – remember, this doesn’t factor in YouTube-crazy India – compared to 37% for paid audio streaming, and 15% for free audio streaming.
The IFPI also reckons that 77% of respondents used YouTube for music in the past month. That makes for an interesting comparison with YouTube’s own official figure, mind: in May 2018 it said that “more than one billion music fans come to YouTube each month”.
That said, video’s share of streaming is falling: in the IFPI’s 2018 study, 52% of global on-demand streaming time was video; 28% was paid audio streaming; and 20% was free audio streaming. So paid audio has taken a bite out of both the other categories over the last year.

4. Smartphones aren’t yet the biggest music device

There are some useful stats on ‘device share’ of music listening time in the IFPI’s report. Radios are still the most popular device, accounting for 29% of the time respondents spend listening to music. However, smartphones are just behind, with a 27% share of listening time – unchanged from the IFPI’s 2018 study.
Of course, smartphones are bigger for younger listeners: they account for 44% off the time 16-24 year-olds spend listening to music, according to the study.
What about radio as a content form, rather than a device? The IFPI says that globally, music listeners average 5.4 hours a week listening to radio either live or on catch-up. That’s actually up by an hour year-on-year from the 4.4 hours reported in the 2018 study.

5. Smart speakers are gaining traction

Music-industry conferences love a panel session on how smart speakers are The Hot Thing in music listening. But are they? The IFPI study offers some numbers on that too. Globally, 20% of respondents have used smart speakers for music in the last three months, although it’s as high as 34% in the US and 30% in the UK.
However, in the stats for device share of music-listening time, smart speakers are still niche: they only account for 3% of global listening according to the IFPI. That’s less than portable Bluetooth speakers (4%) and hi-fis / turntables (8%). That doesn’t mean smart speakers are a flop as a device category: it’s just some handy perspective for those excitable panels.

6. Pop is the tops… but younger people differ

It can feel like hip-hop and R&B are the dominant genres in the streaming era, but from a global perspective, pop is still tops according to the IFPI’s research. In fact, the top 10 favourite genres globally are, in order: Pop; Rock; Oldies; Hip-hop / Rap; Dance / Electronic; Indie / Alternative; K-Pop; R&B; and Classical.
(Our assumption is that Indian film-music and Chinese C-Pop would be in the list if the IFPI was including the surveys from those two countries in its global figures.)
In the global list, ‘Oldies’ didn’t feature in the IFPI’s top-ten-genres list at all in 2018; hip-hop / rap has risen from fifth place to fourth; dance / electronic has fallen from third to fifth; and singer / songwriter has disappeared altogether –or possibly subsumed into other genres.
Again, younger listeners show different habits: 16-24 year-olds are more than four times likely to say hip-hop / rap is their favourite genre as any other age group. And not just American music either: 26% of French 16-24 year-olds cited French-language hip-hop as their favourite genre.

7. Music piracy has fallen in the last year

The IFPI has consistently campaigned against various forms of piracy, and it’s not going to stop now just because legal streaming has pushed infringement to the margins of the industry’s concerns. But its latest study has some good news to bolster that trend.
In 2019, 27% of respondents to its survey reported using copyright infringement as ‘a way to listen to or obtain music in the past month’. That’s down from 38% in last year’s study. 23% of respondents download music through ‘stream-ripping’ services, but that’s also down sharply – from 32% in 2018.
The IFPI maintains that piracy “remains a threat to the music ecosystem”, pointing to the 34% of 16-24 year-olds who stream-rip, but the overall trends feel positive.

8. Take a bow, Mexico

One of the stats that jumps out from the report is this: the 25.6 hours a week that Mexicans spend (on average) listening to music. Impressive, compared to the 18 hours global average.
It’s a reminder of why Mexico has become such an influential market in the streaming ecosystem, capable of propelling Latin American tracks into the global charts of services like Spotify. There aren’t just lots of Mexican music-streamers; they’re heavy listeners too.
(And that’s good news for rock bands: it’s the top genre in Mexico, ahead of pop and Latin pop.)

9. Koreans are the best at buying

When it comes to listening time, South Korea falls some way short of Mexico, with an average of 13.9 hours a week. However, Koreans are still tops when it comes to actually buying music: 44% of respondents there said they’d bought CDs, vinyl or downloads in the last week, well ahead of the 26% global average.
Still, that average is a reminder that the modern music story isn’t entirely about streaming: more than a quarter of music listeners still buy, too.

10. Africa is still a mystery

The IFPI is upfront about its research methodology: for example the exclusion of its India and China surveys from the global figures in its new report. However, it’s important to understand what else isn’t covered here.
While the body notes that the 21 countries surveyed accounted for 92.6% of global recorded-music market revenues in 2018 as tracked in its Global Music Report earlier this year, like that report there’s only one country from Africa (South Africa) and none from the Middle East.
Africa, particularly, is a fascinating market for music listening / consumption, even if that’s not translating to meaningful (or at least easily-measurable) industry revenues yet. Music Ally would love to see someone tackle this issue with a continent-wide survey of similar scale to the IFPI’s new report.



Source: https://musically.com/2019/09/24/music-listening-2019-ifpi-report/

The CD is dead? Not so fast

Best Buy might have dumped it and we're all addicted to Spotify, but the truth about the format's health is complex

Last week, Billboard dropped a two-part music retail bombshell. First, Target is reportedly looking to overhaul its financial arrangement with its music and video vendors. Basically, the shopping giant only wants to pay labels for what product stores actually sell, instead of buying inventory up front and returning unsold merchandise for credit. In an even bigger blow, the article also noted that Best Buy has apparently decided to stop selling CDs in its stores as of July 1.
The news brought on waves of nostalgia for consumers of a certain age. Back in the '90s, when the CD boom was in full effect and e-commerce had yet to become an industry force, Best Buy was a mecca for cheap albums. For kids with limited funds or who didn't have the ability to visit independent record shops, big-box stores offered a gateway to cool. (I vividly remember purchasing Elastica's self-titled debut at Best Buy.) Oddly enough, in recent years I've found that Best Buy is the only brick-and-mortar store in my area that stocked certain albums during release week ("Hesitant Alien," the solo album from My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way, comes to mind).

Still, people who had shopped at Best Buy in recent years weren't exactly surprised at the move. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the CD section (and selection) in stores has been shrinking for years. This mirrors industry statistics. According to Billboard's deep dive into Nielsen's 2017 Year-End Music Report, there were 88.2 million CDs sold last year, a decrease of 20 percent from 2016. And although vinyl remained popular — sales rose nine percent, to 14.3 million — streaming dominated the year. On-demand audio and video streams increased a whopping 43 percent, to 618 billion. Total physical and digital album sales, meanwhile, decreased 17.7 percent, to 169.15 million.

Taken at face value, these statistics seem to indicate that the days of actually owning music physically or digitally as opposed to enjoying through a streaming service are numbered. However, these doom-and-gloom proclamations can feel like self-fulfilling prophecies. Discussions about how the CD is dying pop up on a regular basis in a way similar to how all those articles about rock 'n' roll's death remain popular. Indeed, many stories act as though CDs are already extinct. "If the majors don't play ball and give in to the new sale terms, it could considerably hasten the phase down of the CD format," Billboard said of Target's ultimatum, while a USA Today headline on the Best Buy move reads, "Music CDs fading fast as Best Buy may hit 'eject' button." It's hard not to think sometimes that people actually want CDs to die out.
 
Technology trends aren't helping this suspicion. Good luck finding a laptop with a built-in CD drive. Cars are also trending in that direction. For example, the 2018 Ford EcoSport doesn't have a CD player, only streaming capabilities. "Streaming is the fastest growing source of music and video content and particularly with younger consumers, who we've found time and time again prefer streaming and subscription services over traditional forms like CDs," Michael O'Brien, the SUV group marketing manager for Ford, told NPR in 2017.
Of course, the idea that technology and marketing affect how we listen to music is hardly new. Formats have cycled in and out of popularity with the introduction of cool accessories — the Walkman, boom boxes, the Discman, iPod. For its part, the compact disc's futuristic sheen was what originally bolstered its cachet in the '80s. Still, the CD market also came with its own sneaky pressure — namely, that music fans were encouraged to re-buy albums they already owned on LP or cassette, due to the supposedly better-quality sound. 

When you don't have a machine to play CDs, it follows you would buy fewer CDs. But in contemporary times, it's not a stretch to wonder if companies are responding to consumer demand when they eliminate CD players, or is this another example of corporations shaping consumer habits and hastening the format's demise, for financial gain? After all, CD (or DVD) drives are still useful and needed for plenty of work purposes, and people now have to purchase them separately. In 2016, The Verge pointed out that Apple's controversial removal of its headphone jack on newer iPhones helped the company's bottom line. It's easy to see something similar happening here.

Compared to two decades ago, when CDs were at peak popularity, of course 2017's sales statistics look anemic. But the compact disc is still the most popular format for people purchasing records. The second-most-popular format, with 66.2 million units sold? Another one pundits love to say is dying, digital albums. And it's certainly not correct to say that all consumers are eschewing CDs. Luke Sardello, the co-owner of Dallas-based Josey Records, told the Dallas Observer that the store has expanded its used CD inventory, in large part because that slice of its business "has grown year over year the past two years."
"CDs are still our third best-selling category behind new and used LPs," he says. "There is still demand for CDs by music fans that prefer to have a physical copies of their favorite albums without making the jump back into vinyl. They still like seeing the artwork and reading the liner notes. CDs still tell a story that streaming can't do." 

That used CDs are now cheaper than ever likely explains some of this popularity. But the format's convenience and stability is still unparalleled. Vinyl isn't exactly portable and, unless you're downloading music to a phone for offline listening, you're at the mercy of a solid internet connection if you want to rock out. Artist catalogs disappear and reappear from streaming services all the time. Those of some artists, such as Def Leppard, weren't even available until recently. Physical product also still offers more precise, correct information about album credits. Although Spotify recently started adding this info, Pitchfork points out how imperfect the endeavor has been so far. 

Plus, operating under the premise that streaming is now everyone's default illustrates a big (and classist) presumption: that everyone can access or pay for streaming service subscriptions. Reliable and affordable broadband internet access, which is necessary to have steady access to streaming platforms, still isn't available in many rural areas. A January 2018 Rolling Stone feature on country rap (or "hick-hop") noted that artists in this genre still sell physical records. "This fan base of lower-class country folk haven't all evolved to the digital world," says one country rap artist, Big Smo. "We don't have new shit."
Although the CD market looks bleak now, it's likely this won't always be the case. The vinyl resurgence (and, more recently, the cassette micro-boom) illustrates that even formats left for dead can bounce back. Retro nostalgia is always in fashion; people love to fetishize the past, and what it represents. And it's not like buying (or not buying) CDs is an either-or proposition: My household still buys CDs in addition to new and used vinyl, and we also subscribe to a streaming service. Compact discs will still have their place in a music collection, as long as people give them a shot at survival.

https://www.salon.com/2018/02/10/the-cd-is-dead-not-so-fast/

15 Places to Get Free Music Downloads

lifewire.com, by Stacy Fisher

There are plenty of websites out there that offer free music downloads, and we've weeded through them so you can find only the best and brightest in this list of the best 15 places to get free music downloads legally.

At these websites, you'll be able to download free music in high-quality MP3 format so they'll play on your computer, phone, or tablet. Since you can download and save them, they'll forever be yours.

All the free music downloads here are legal. They're either public domain or, in most cases, the artists have given permission for you to download and enjoy their hard work. That means you can feel great about listening to the music and discovering some hidden gems you might have otherwise passed up.




Jamendo

What We Like
Lots of ways to browse for music downloads
Lets you stream music, too
Includes an online radio function
There are mobile apps you can use

What We Don't Like
Downloads are in MP3 only; no option for other formats
Requires you to make a user account (it's free) to download the music
Free downloads are in MP3 quality only, not HD

All the free music downloads at Jamendo are made available through Creative Commons licensing meaning that the artists themselves have decided they want to give out their music for free for the masses to enjoy.

You can discover new music at Jamendo by viewing the most popular music and the songs that trending. There's also a Latest music filter to see recently added songs. You can also search for artists that you know to see if their music is available for download.

Another way to find great music here is by listening to one of the Jamendo radio channels. When you find a song or artist you like, you can then download that single track or the entire album.

Yet another way to browse this free music is via playlists, like "Best of January," "Electro Funk Frenzy," "Valentine's Day," and "Girls On the Rise."

If you'd rather stream the music at Jamendo instead of download it, they give you that option, too.




NoiseTrade

What We Like
You get the whole album at once in one click
Lets you preview the tracks before downloading them
Provides a way to tip the artists
Also includes eBooks and audiobooks

What We Don't Like
Must download the whole album; can't pick specific tracks
You have to enter your email address to download the music

You can download thousands of free music albums from NoiseTrade, through Paste Magazine, and they're all completely legal to take. The artists want you to check out their creations and if you like it and are inclined to do so, you can tip them or help promote them to your friends.

You can stream part of the songs right now, but to download an album and access the full-length music, you need to enter your email address and zip code. You'll receive the album as a ZIP file which contains the MP3 files.

You can easily find new albums you want to download by viewing the "Notable" picks on the home page, plus there's a list of genres you can comb through.

NoiseTrade also offers free eBook and audiobook downloads for authors who'd like to share and earn your tip.




Amazon

What We Like
You can sort the list of music downloads
Provides several ways to filter and refine the list of downloads
The songs can be previewed

What We Don't Like
The download process can be confusing
You have to log in to your Amazon account to download the music
Only the music through the link below is free; other music on Amazon is not

There are thousands and thousands of free music downloads at Amazon.com, making it one of my favorite websites to visit when I'm looking for new music to download legally.

You can see the all the free music downloads by choosing a genre or sorting by popularity, release date, length of the song, reviews, or in alphabetical order by title, artist, or album.

You can play the songs before downloading them, but when you're ready to save the songs to your computer, add the item to your cart. Then, you can check out as if you were purchasing something by pressing Confirm Purchase. You'll be taken to a link to download the free music, and it'll also be saved in the Digital Orders tab of your order history.




Bandcamp

What We Like
Lets you download songs and full albums
Includes lots of tracks you won't find on other free music download sites
You can choose to pay if you want to
No user account is needed

What We Don't Like
Not every song you see is free to download
You have to explicitly say that you're choosing to not pay for the music
There isn't a "free only" page

Bandcamp makes it easy for artists to share their music in a "name your price" type of setting. This means that while you can pay for the music, another option is to put a zero in the payment box and download the song for free.

The Discover page is a great way to find the best selling music at Bandcamp, plus new arrivals and songs recommended by artists.

Not all songs can be downloaded for free but for the ones that don't have a minimum price, put a zero in the "Name Your Price" box. To do this, choose Buy Digital Track, enter 0 in the box, select download to your computer, and follow the on-screen prompts to get the download.

Sometimes, there also isn't a minimum price on entire albums, so you can use the Buy Digital Album option to get all of its songs for free.




Internet Archive's Audio Archive

What We Like
Lots of free audio downloads to pick from
Several sorting and filtering options
Most music can be downloaded in several audio formats
Supports previewing music
You don't need a user account to download the free music

What We Don't Like
Has a lot more lower quality music than other music download sites
Navigating the website can be confusing

Internet Archive's Audio Archive has millions of results for free downloads of music, audio, podcasts, radio programs, and most notably their Live Music Archive.

You can sort the free music downloads by most viewed items, title, date published, or creator, as well as filter the results by media type (concerts, audio, etc.), topics & subjects (e.g. rock or funk), language, and more.

You'll find all kinds of artists with free music downloads here including Jack Johnson, John Mayer, Grateful Dead, 311, and Smashing Pumpkins.

There are usually multiple file formats that you can download the free music in, like MP3 and OGG. These are listed in the DOWNLOAD OPTIONS area of every download page.




SoundClick

What We Like
Includes music from signed and unsigned artists
Lots of genres to pick from
No sign in necessary
Includes lots of music download deals and discounts

What We Don't Like
Not every song is free
There isn't a single page where you can find all the free music; it's mixed in with music that costs
Some songs can only be streamed

SoundClick is the ultimate portal into finding free music downloads directly from the artists websites. These artists have decided they'd like to let people download their music for free. This includes signed and unsigned musicians.

With SoundClick, you can browse through the music charts and genres until you find a free music download you'd like to have and then either listen to or download that song.

You can also create custom radio stations, get to know other listeners on the forums, and read more about your favorite SoundClick artists.

While you can, of course, download free music from SoundClick, some artists make their music available only after you've paid for the download, and others allow music streaming only.




Last.fm

What We Like
Every download is available in one click
A user account is not required
There are lots of ways to browse for music

What We Don't Like
It's hard to search for free music only
You can't preview songs before downloading them
MP3 is the only download option

Last.fm has several pages of free music downloads that fall into all genres. You can browse these free downloads by category, new releases, coming soon, or by simply looking through the whole list.

Just one selection will download your chosen song.

Besides free music downloads, you can also stream thousands of songs and get recommendations of bands you'll love.




SoundCloud

What We Like
Tons of content
Includes music downloads from well-known and new, up-and-coming artists
Every track can be streamed before downloading
Easier to find free downloads vs some other music download sites

What We Don't Like
You have to log in to download music
Finding free downloads can be difficult

SoundCloud is a website that lets you stream and download free music. Content at SoundCloud is sometimes uploaded by professional artists, while others are shared by independent musicians.

Not all music on SoundCloud can be downloaded, and some require you to Like a Facebook page to get the file. However, music that can be downloaded instantly and without an account, either have a Download file button in the More menu or a FREE DOWNLOAD button under the song.




Audiomack

What We Like
All songs are streamable
Easy to find popular song downloads
Many ways to sort, filter, and browse for free music
No need to make a user account
Mobile apps for streaming music

What We Don't Like
Not every song can be downloaded
No way to find just the free music downloads

You'll like Audiomack if you like SoundCloud and are interested in finding new music. All the music on this website is 100 percent legal and free to stream, and depending on the artist, you'll find music downloads, too.

The Audiomack website is very easy to use. You can search for songs, albums, and artists or browse the Trending or Top Songs sections. There's also a Recently Added page to find all the newest music at Audiomack.

Some of the music genres on this website include reggae, pop, R&B, hip-hop, instrumental, and afrobeats.

You can download music at Audiomack without needing a user account. Most if not all of the songs are in the MP3 format.

If you prefer to stream music from your phone or tablet, Audiomack works that way, too, on both Android and iOS devices.




Spinrilla

What We Like
Stream and download.
No user account necessary for albums.
Download in bulk or individually.
No website ads.

What We Don't Like
User account is required for single-track downloads.
Some tracks can only be streamed.

Spinrilla has free hip-hop mixtape downloads. You can browse for these music downloads by the mixtape name, single, or chart, such as the most popular mixtapes today, this month, or all time.

The website navigation is clean and easy to understand, and you only need a user account if you want to download individual songs. Whole albums can be downloaded in seconds without an account.

This website also lets you see which mixtapes will be released in the future. The Upcoming Mixtapes page shows when each mixtape will be available.

These music downloads are accessible from the website but you can also listen on your Android or iOS device via the Spinrilla mobile app.




Musopen

What We Like
Completely free music downloads you can use for anything
Includes sheet music downloads
Lots of unique ways to find free music
Supports previewing the music
Includes an online radio option

What We Don't Like
Music downloads require you to log in to a user account
Per-day download limits
No free HD audio

Musopen has sheet music and recordings that are completely free, legal, and copyright-free. You can listen online or download the music for whatever purpose. There's even an online radio you can listen to from a computer or through their Classical Radio mobile app.

There are lots of ways to find free music downloads at Musopen: browse by composer, performer, instrument, form, or time period. Of course, you can also do a manual search to see if they have something specific.

Another way to find music downloads here is to use the Music Discovery Tool. With this tool, you can filter all the music on the website by instrument, rating, and license type (to find only public domain music, creative commons music, etc.).

You can preview music without logging in but to actually download anything you find on Musopen, you have to create a user account. A free account gives you access to five music downloads every day and standard, lossy audio quality.



ReverbNation


What We Like
Helps you find up-and-coming artists
All the music can be streamed
Lets you browse for downloads by genre

What We Don't Like
Not every song is free to download
You need a user account to download some music

ReverbNation is a good pick if you're looking for music downloads from artists you don't yet know about. Several now-popular bands like Imagine Dragons and The Civil Wars started out on ReverbNation.

Not every song you see on this website can be downloaded, but it is all streamable through your web browser. Downloadable songs are indicated by a small download button next to the song.

The Discover page is a good start if you're not sure where to begin looking for new music downloads at ReverbNation. To search by genre, use the Charts page.


DatPiff

What We Like
Includes mixes from popular artists
Lets you download entire albums at once
Mobile apps are available
No user account is necessary

What We Don't Like
Limited mainly to rap music
Music can be downloaded as MP3 only

If you're into mixtapes and rap, you'll love DatPiff because that's most of the free music downloads you'll find at this website. You can stream as well as download the music.

What you'll find at DatPiff are not only mixtapes made by fans but also releases from artists looking for recognition by giving out their music for free.

One easy way to find free music downloads at DatPiff is to look through the most listened, most downloaded, highest rated, and hot this week sections. Those can be further broken down into all time, this month, this week, and today to see what's been popular over time.

Some of the most popular mixtape downloads at DatPiff are from artists like Lil Wayne, Wiz Khalifa, Big Sean, Meek Mill, and Jadakiss.

DatPiff is available on not only computers but also your mobile device. You can get the DatPiff app for free for iOS, Android, and Windows.


Free Music Archive


What We Like
No user account is needed to download music
Several ways to sort the music
You can listen before downloading
Categorizes song downloads into several genres

What We Don't Like
MP3 is the only download option

You can also download free music at Free Music Archive, which is directed by the freeform radio station WFMU. The music here is free for you to legally download (even without a user account) and is a mix of public domain and Creative Commons licenses.

The easiest way to find music you'd like to download at Free Music Archive is to browse through the genres of music or watch their blog for collections, artists, or songs they'll highlight. They also have top charts for all time, this week, and this month.

If you create a free account at Free Music Archive you'll be able to make your own collections and interact with other listeners.


YouTube


What We Like
There's a lot of music available
All the songs can be streamed
Apps let you stream from your mobile device

What We Don't Like
It's really hard to find free music downloads
It's too easy to download copyrighted music accidentally

Yes, YouTube is a huge source for music and most of it is illegal to download due to copyright restrictions.

However, if you filter your search results for Creative Commons videos only, it's completely safe to download music from YouTube. Look for videos that have download links to the audio, but if you're sure it's legal and don't see a download link, you can still get it with a YouTube to MP3 downloader.

You might also filter Duration for Short ((here) to find what are most likely music videos instead of interviews, YouTube movies, etc.

Despite YouTube being the largest video streaming service on the internet, we've placed it at the very bottom of this list because it's not easy to find free music among all the other content.




Source: https://www.lifewire.com/free-music-downloads-1356648

The Music Revolution. Thanks MP3!

by Juan Esteban Correa

I was just a naive 15 year old in the year 1998, and my older cousin introduced me to the best invention in computers after the Internet, the MP3. It was an instant love, my goal was to use all my PC storage (10GBs) and fill it with music. I was ready to start, I got my first MP3s from my cousin: Nena 99 – Luftballoons, Depeche Mode - Just can’t get enough , and Boston - More than a feeling and a few others. An eclectic collection of music I know, but it was just the beginning.

To play my music I had to install an MP3 player, and I installed Winamp my all time favorite player.

Winamp was so cool, it had the slickest interface and it was the first media player that let you create playlists.

There were 3 ways to get mp3s back then, ripping your cds to mp3, copying mp3s from your friends, or downloading them from the Internet. Of course the first option was the easiest one, I converted all my CD library to mp3s, that’s how I got my first 1000 songs. But this method was not sustainable, it took a lot of time to rip the cds, and I didn’t have enough money to keep up with the latest hits from my favorite artists. So I had to go to my good friend the Internet to stay on top of the trends. There were few options back then to get music from the Internet, a couple of sites with files in their root directory. My weapon of choice, The Music Lover a site that no longer exist that had the Billboard Top 40 Hits updated every week. Not the best source for indie music, but it had all the MTV hits. It was good enough for me. That’s how I added a couple of 1000 new songs to my music library.

After some months a friend introduce me to Napster the first peer to peer file sharing app. Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning revolutionized the world 19 years ago with this service. Although the focus was music it gave birth to other P2P technologies that are booming today like the Blockchain and Bitcoin. Napster was amazing, sadly it only lasted for of couple years due to copyright infrigment. Some other services came up to the rescue (Limewire, eMule, Gnutella) but none of them were as good as Napster.

Quote from The Social Network movie.

“Sean Parker: Well, I founded an internet company that let folks download and share music for free.
Amelia Ritter: Kind of like Napster?
Sean Parker: Exactly like Napster.
Amelia Ritter: What do you mean?
Sean Parker: I founded Napster.
Amelia Ritter: Sean Parker founded Napster.”

About 2 years later one of the last geniuses in human history, Steve Jobs, made paying for music cool 😎 again with the launch of the iTunes store. With iTunes my library kept growing, it had almost every song in the planet. Every song on iTunes had the best song compression settings, and was the best app for organizing music. iTunes quickly became the most popular MP3 player, it had a clean UI that was simple and elegant, obviously you can’t expect less from a product from Apple.

I had everything under control with iTunes, my library of more that 30k songs was in sync with all my devices, I had playlists for every genre, audience and mood. I was on top of my game until Spotify came knocking my door. Spotify was a game changer my library grew 100X, now I could stream every song in the world and the best part I didn’t run out of storage.

I have more than 200 playlists on Spotify. I have the app on my Mac, my smartphone, my car, my tv and now on my homespeaker. I discover about 100 new songs every week.

Music is the answer, it has give meaning to my live. Thank you MP3 for creating this revolution. Can’t wait to see what the future will bring us.

PS. A few other services that have being part of this history:

Shazam, YouTube, Vevo, Soundcloud, Musical.ly, Beats. Thank you!
Source: https://medium.com/@juanestebancorrea/the-music-revolution-thanks-mp3-aa739b370190

The Long Overdue Death of Retail Compact Disc (CD)

Memorializing the Compact Disc. Once upon a time, the CD was the ubiquitous music platform. Our story outlines how the disc-based music technology was adopted, loved and eventually abandoned by a generation that arrived a little too late to collect vinyl record albums. In its day, the CD weathered a storm of competitors that sought to usurp the audio throne by offering key improvements in storage capacity and audio resolution. But behind the inevitable fall of the CD is a story of how the music industry refused to read the writing on the wall.
All things considered, I was rather late to the compact disc game. Having been born to your typical middle-class family in the early 1980s, for much of my early childhood I made do with cassette tapes of my favorite acts, from the sweet, poppy sounds of Men Without Hats to a Canadian band with the (sadly for a pre-pubescent boy) very misleading name, Barenaked Ladies. Other great groups from the late 1980s and early 90s, like Guns N Roses, Nirvana, and Soundgarden, also managed to capture my attention despite some of the frustrating limitations of cassette technology - like having to fast forward and rewind just so I could listen to GNR's deliciously guttural rant "Get in the Ring" a few more times.

Compact Disc Firsts

• Optical digital data-storage was invented by Jim Russel who filed the first patents in 1966, later purchased by Sony and Philips to develop the CD

• Developed in collaboration by Sony and Philips, the Compact Disc launched in 1982
• The first CD was officially released on October 1, 1982, it was Billy Joel album 52nd Street. 
• The first CD player was the Sony CDP-101, also launched on October 1, 1982. It retailed for $730, a heavy price for the privilege of listening to 52nd Street by Billy Joel in pristine digital glory.

Soundtrack of Our Lives on CD

Ah, but that all changed in the winter of 1995, when my parents placed a Discman under the Christmas tree, along with my first three CDs: Collective Soul's incredible blue album, Soul Asylum's "Let Your Dim Light Shine," and Foo Fighters' self-titled debut. For the next few years, I rarely left the house without that clunky, BK Whopper-sized device, which I connected to an old stereo when I got home. And, while my collection of CDs was by no means large, or even particularly impressive, I rarely went more than a month or so without thinking about, pining for, and then finally pooling what little grass-cutting money I had together to buy the next big album.
For the rest of my teenage years, I gravitated towards the kind of music that had animated my imagination when I first got that Discman, with CDs from Green Day, Stone Temple Pilots, Nine Inch Nails, Pearl Jam, and the Smashing Pumpkins. Then there were those bands that didn't quite pack stadiums and weren't everyone's cup of tea but, perhaps for those very reasons, garnered my love: Better Than Ezra, Toadies, The Verve Pipe, Spacehog, and Canadian acts like Moist, Limblifter, Econoline Crush, Finger Eleven, and, of course, my personal favourite, Our Lady Peace

US CD Sales Since 1982

 

Oh, those were the days. I'm guessing I'm not the only one who fondly remembers the smell -- of some weird, foreign and unhealthy chemicals, that gently emanated from the freshly opened case of a new compact disc. It was the good kind of miasma, the type that promised hours of enjoyment as I played video games, chatted about girls with pals, or drifted off to sleep. I can even remember how you had to pull a little harder to get the disc out the first time you used it -- the little 'squelch' sound the plastic made as the disc slid over the case's donut-hole plug for the first but hardly last time. Alas, these finer details of CD ownership are now little more than the footnotes in music history. By the early 2000s, a number of factors emerged that, within a rather shocking amount of time, signaled the end of the compact disc.
First and foremost for me, personally, it was remarkably hard to predict which discs would be winners. Sure, you could listen to the radio -- that's usually where I heard new music for the first time since my parents didn't have cable television and therefore no access to MTV or Canada's Much Music -- but for most bands that meant exposure to just one or two songs. In the end, this made the CD-buying experience a little like Russian roulette -- a slight overstatement, but less so when you consider, that through most of the 90s, each CD was about $20 and my job was cutting neighbors' lawns during the summer.

That meant I bought many, many duds -- usually, one-hit-wonder CDs where one fantastic song on the radio gave me hope the entire album would be amazing. Oh, I still remember the desperate, sinking feeling that washed over me as I frantically searched an album for a second or third decent track -- and then failing to land on one. It happened far too often for me, and as time went on I became less willing to gamble away the little cash I had. Eventually, even albums with two or three great songs seemed a waste, which complicated things further, since the early 2000s brought what I deemed fewer of the rock-solid albums of the 90s -- albums like Offspring's Smash, Green Day's Dookie, or Nirvana's Nevermind.
RIAA Recorded Music Sales

• CD sales surpassed cassette tape in 1991, its final year as the top format in music sales was 2015
• Music streaming subscription became the top selling music format for the first time ever in 2016
• Adjusted for inflation, 2016 vinyl sales hit highest levels since 1989

Digital Downloads Arrive

Right around the same time, friends and coworkers at the grocery store where I worked started talking about this new software that allowed you to download songs or even whole albums without paying anything at all! What was this fan-dangled technology, I wondered, and how can I get in on it?
Although Audioholics can't condone unlicensed digital downloads, it's safe to say it was a significant factor in the decline of the disc because nearly everyone who listened to music at the dawn of the new millennium at least experimented with digital downloads. Although I missed the Napster train, I was most definitely aboard for the Limewire bus. It had some serious drawbacks - it left all kinds of nasty junk on the family computer - but all of a sudden I had nearly a world of music at my fingertips. And so began the age of downloading tracks and burning them to discs. In its own way, it was thrilling: you could create the ultimate CD tailored to your own music interests and not those of some goofball studio exec. My ripped discs would go from Blink 182 to Deftones to Eiffel 65 and I could often pack more than 20 tracks on a single CD.
And it was cheap: other than having to buy packs of blank CDs and paying to get the spyware wiped from my chugging PC, the process was very affordable. So affordable, in fact, that I no longer felt the need to protect my CDs as if they were children; instead, they fell down the side of car seats and slid under my bed, where they sometimes stayed until scratched beyond use. But no biggie; I could just use the files I'd already downloaded to create a whole new CD in a few minutes.

Retailers and Car Manufacturers Sense the Stench of Death of the Compact Disc

Fast-forward a decade or so and the CD is finally, finally being phased out by the few retailers who still offer them. At Best Buy, one of the handful of companies that's so far (narrowly) survived the digital revolution, in recent years the compact disc section has shrunk down further and further, to the point where it's little more than a novelty; a place where your Dad can grab best-of albums from Led Zeppelin or The Who. From literally rows and rows of compact discs and several "listening stations," big retailers like Best Buy have in many cases shrunk their CD offerings to a small display at the end of a single aisle.
Now, even that meager offering is about to disappear, with reports indicating Best Buy will cease selling compact discs this July. Target, another brick-and-mortar retailer from the CD's heyday, is expected to follow suit shortly thereafter.


To add a final nail in the CD proverbial coffin, car manufacturers are phasing out CD players starting in 2018.  Instead, you will find at least one USB port, and Bluetooth capability for streaming music from your phone pretty standard fare.
In truth, this is long overdue. Even the Napster and Limewire age is a thing of the past, replaced in large part by streaming services like Apple Music, Google Play, Spotify, and countless others, which give you access to a great fount of music for less than what a single CD cost in the 90s. In fact, that's how I'm listening to 'ol Kurt sing about teenage angst right now.
Nevertheless, this seems like a good time for a heart-felt send-off to the compact disc and the many CD collections that are still out there, in basements, attics, storage lockers, boxes under stairways. Cheers and RIP. 
Now that the once dominant audio platform's days are behind us the question remains: Did you like CDs? Please share your thoughts in the related forum thread below.

Source: https://www.audioholics.com/editorials/the-long-overdue-death-of-retail-compact-disc

The MP3 Revolution

Our journey starts in New York City.
You know the place I’m talking about. If you’ve watched Seinfeld, it’s the diner Jerry and friends hole up in almost every episode, but that’s wasn’t why I was there. This was where Suzanne Vega wrote her song “Tom’s Diner” sometime in 1981. Now I’m not the biggest Suzanne Vega fan, but there’s a reason she’s considered the mother of MP3. “Tom’s Diner” was used extensively in the research that went into the creation of the MP3 format. And this diner is where it all began.

It’s a good song, but more importantly, it’s entirely a cappella—and recorded flawlessly. Audiophiles in the late 80s found that the smooth yet subtle performance Vega delivered in the original was perfect for tuning their hi-fi speaker systems. As it turns out, the human voice was a good way to test for clarity, and playing “Tom’s Diner” reveals minor tuning problems in a speaker.

But as most great things in life are, Tom’s Diner’s historical importance happened completely by chance. Karlheinz Brandenburg (the lead scientist working on the compression algorithm) was finishing up his post-doctorate working on digital music compression, when he heard “Tom’s Diner” playing on the radio down the hall. “This. This is the song that I will listen to countless times on my mission to create the best audio algorithm the world has ever seen!”, he thought to himself. And yes, I did make that part up but every hero (or villain) needs that eureka moment so I took some liberties here. Anyway, back to the story.

Brandenburg had been studying psychoacoustics, or how people perceive music, and used the concept of auditory masking as the baseline for what he wanted his algorithm to do. Without getting too scientific, auditory masking is when there is a loud sound that drowns out another smaller sound.

For whom the bell tolls

If I strike a bell in a quiet room, and then go outside and strike it again, listen to what happens.

The bell didn’t sound the same just then, did it? It was harder to hear, lost in the cacophony of the outside world. The ringing was shorter, wasn’t it? Also, was the bell quieter? It was.

No, the outside world didn’t make that bell sound any different, but rather, the way MP3 compresses audio did. But even if you tried this for yourself in the real world, the result would be similar. Our ears and brain didn’t evolve to hear the difference between two specific tones at 632Hz and 635Hz, they evolved to hear a growl. Or a yell. You know, sounds that might signal impending doom.
If a louder sound of similar frequency is present with a quieter one, your brain deletes it. This physiological response—auditory masking—is the entire basis of the psychoacoustic algorithm that defines MP3 compression. Any sound your brain would normally not be able to hear: the encoding deletes to save space. If it works as intended, you’ll have a much smaller file- and your ears would be none the wiser. This happens all the time in our everyday lives. Ever been in a bar that’s too loud to hear what your friend is saying? Same thing.

The MP3 is why we listen to songs on our phones today.

Brandenburg used this to his advantage, devising an algorithm that would find the sound data that humans couldn’t hear because of auditory masking, and just getting rid of it. He took “Tom’s Diner” and ran it through his compression algorithm…. and Vega’s vocals in “Tom’s Diner” sounded like a possessed demon fighting its way through his speakers. Clearly, the algorithm was doing something funky. So he tweaked it, and ran it again. And again. And again. Each time changing the algorithm slightly until, after what I’m sure was a great few months of listening to the same song constantly, the differences between the original and the end result were almost imperceptible. MP3 compression was finally ready for the big time.

When the MP3 was invented, it was still a long way off from becoming the dominant music format of the new millennium. It had to overcome technological limitations, a cartel-like recording industry, and it needed the internet to do it.
While MP3 was a great way to compress an audio file in 1990, consumer storage just wasn’t up to the task. While you could theoretically hold 700MB on a CD, hard drives of the time were typically no bigger than a few tens of megabytes at best. You couldn’t just copy 700MB of uncompressed WAV audio- there just wasn’t space. Piracy wasn’t really a viable option.

At the time, if you wanted digital audio, you had to go to record store… or sign up for one of those insane CD clubs. You couldn’t listen to songs before buying them without the radio. You couldn’t just go on YouTube, and you definitely couldn’t torrent anything on a dial-up modem. The music industry knew it had a monopoly on its market, and from 1995 through 2000, several companies banded together to artificially inflate the price of CDs by about $5 per album. Consumers knew they were getting gouged, but there wasn’t a clearly superior alternative until 1999. That year, all hell broke loose, and MP3 began its ascent to becoming the dominant music format.

Evolution

The world of 1999 was far different than the world of 1990. Hard drive storage had climbed orders of magnitude greater from 20MB into several Gigabytes of storage. 56k and cable modems were replacing the 24-baud models of the past, allowing just enough download speed to snag an MP3 in a few minutes, and just like that: the landscape was fertile for MP3’s technological revolution.
That revolution came in the form of Napster. Founded in the greater Boston area by brothers Shawn and John Fanning; along with Sean Parker, Napster offered its users a peer-to-peer networking solution to share their music online. For the first time ever, your average consumer could go online, search for anything they wanted, download it, and create a library of digital music without buying anything. CD-Rs allowed users to create their own CDs as well. Piracy wasn’t just an expression of rebellion, but a market response to an overpriced and inflexible commodity.

By early 2000, Napster had over 20 million users, downloading over a billion songs. By former employees’ own accounts, their software team could barely keep up with how fast the traffic expanded, even after attracting significant resources from venture capital firms to address the issue.
That was the first sign that file sharing wasn’t just a flash in the pan. It was here to stay. In fact, the number of P2P file sharers would continue to expand, with the NPD group estimated 15 million households used P2P networks in 2006, and 18.3% of all computers worldwide had Limewire (another popular P2P service) installed.

Almost 20 percent of the world's computers had Limewire. That's more than had macOS. Let that sink in.

After a 31% drop in industry CD sales that year, the Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA panicked, and found an opportune punching bag in online music piracy. Though the MP3’s spread arguably increased demand for music, they tried to strangle it in the crib by suing Napster.
The future of the popular file sharing service became the hot-button issue of 2000, with musicians and record companies alike taking starkly diverging positions on the issue in a very public forum. Many people remember the outspoken Lars Ulrich of Metallica fame leading the RIAA’s crusade against Napster, but fewer people remember Public Enemy frontman Chuck D’s oddly prescient defense of free music sharing in a debate between the two musicians hosted by Charlie Rose.

Chuck’s position was that MP3 sharing was going to change the balance of power in favor of the content creator, instead of the record label holding all the power. While Lars claimed that it didn’t matter: MP3 sharing was (in his words) illegal, Chuck pointed out that most people across the globe didn’t have a way to “get found” and that distributing music for free online would increase demand.
History proved Chuck D right, but unfortunately for Napster, they lost their fight and shut down in July 2001. But the toothpaste was out of the tube. As soon as one P2P service was destroyed, another cropped up, and so on and so forth over the 2000s. When attacking P2P services didn’t stem the tide of MP3 sharing, he RIAA went after thousands of individuals by abusing the subpoena process, famously attempting to sue twelve-year-old children and the people who were literally incapable of stealing the music they were sued over. In most of the 17,587 people sued, the RIAA opted to take a cash settlement instead of pursuing cases to completion, but the industry’s image was tarnished forever as a result.
And MP3 sharing persisted.

New horizons

To meet the new demand for a way to listen to MP3 files, manufacturers started to release digital music players, capable of storing more music than the venerable compact disc in a package that was far more convenient. In 1998, the Recording Industry Association of America failed to win a judgement against Diamond for their MP3 player, thus opening the floodgates for more commercially-available portable music players. Now that there was no legal barrier anymore, any company could profit off of the explosive spread of the MP3.

The decision was a rare double-whammy, as it were. On top of creating a legal market for MP3 players, it also set the precedent for a legal market for MP3 downloads in the following years, which also paved the way for the long-term success of streaming services. But there is one product that would help drive the final nail in the CD coffin. In October 2001, Apple released the iPod.

After the MP3 was done turning the music industry on its head, the MP3 Player came along and changed everything we know about smartphones.

Hot on the heels of MP3’s rapid rise, many companies tried to create a pocketable MP3 player with mass appeal. Forget about sex appeal. SaeHan Information Systems released the first commercial personal music player in 1998: the MPMan F10, not to be confused with Diamond Multimedia’s Rio PMP300, which was released eight months later.

To no one’s surprise, rival companies tried to ride on the Rio’s coattails, but hard drive players were still cumbersome and a chore to navigate. Things were slow. You could cook a frozen pizza, eat it, and return to your computer only to see that it was on the brink of overloading from transferring a few CD’s-worth of songs. As you may expect, this created a demand for a more efficient, portable, and intuitive music experience. It wasn’t until the iPod that gold was struck.

The rise of the iPod

Prior to October 2001, we recognized Apple for their computers and as that thing that magically keeps the doctor away. But Apple hit the ground running by announcing the iPod. Its debut form looks embarrassingly archaic from a 2018 perspective. However, at the time it was a breakthrough for portable music and carefully negotiated consumer demands for an all-in-one media player with an unheard of storage capacity of 5GB. Not only that, but the 1st gen iPod provided 20 minutes of shock protection. It’s comical now, but users could exercise freely without worrying about damaging the hard drive. Sure, it wasn’t the first compact MP3 player to reside in the pockets of children and women’s jeans alike, but it was the one that consumers unanimously drooled over.
With the slogan, “1,000 songs in your pocket” and a well-timed release for the holiday season, the first iteration was a success, selling 125,000 units [3, 14]. Its spring 2002 update sealed the deal with Windows compatibility; users could easily operate within a well-oiled ecosystem unlike ever before. This provided a way to completely customize what music consumers bought, kept, and listened to without needing to carry a library of discs. Two years later, the 4th generation iPod received photo capabilities, foreshadowing the market for a multifunctional device.

A music player that takes photographs? What could possibly come next?

As our voracious appetite for convenient media consumption grew, Apple and others continued to innovate, keeping up with the exponential curve of demand. Video playback and basic gaming functionality were integrated. Meanwhile, single devices were granted increasing functionality while becoming evermore portable. Of course, competitors garnered followers for their portable media players too, such as the Sansa Clip, which had dirt-cheap affordability on its side. But their efforts couldn’t keep pace with Apple’s iPod hierarchy.
Following the iPod Classic’s success, the iPod Mini had large shoes to fill. As we know, size six feet will never fill a size 10 shoe. Thus, Apple quickly rebranded the Mini in favor the Nano in 2005, which celebrated eight generations of success. This year also included the Shuffle, the “first iPod under $100” A summer later, Apple made a successful push to attract athletes with the Nike + iPod partnership. While Apple continued to roll out improved iPod iterations, they were also working on what was intellectually conceived in as “Project Purple” and “N45,” known to us lay-people as the iPhone and iPod Touch, respectively.

The king is dead. Long live the king.

Though we may never know if the chicken or the egg came first, we do know that the iPhone preceded the iPod Touch. The latter of which was a sleeker, thinner, sexier iPhone… without the phone, that is. Released in 2007, the Touch made for a costly holiday gift that year and for years to come. It served as a middle ground for parents uncomfortable with allowing their children unrestricted access to something like the LG enV
Announced months earlier at MWC 2007, the iPhone made the buzz word. Passionate fanboys lead news outlets to refer to it as the “Jesus phone,” due to its cult-like following. The MP3 was now truly ubiquitous. We began to experience a decline in portable media player sales. Since having a separate device was too inconvenient for most people stopped using physical media in favor of their Swiss Army Knife of a smartphone.

Our phones shifted from a practical object to the extension of the self that we know today. Wherever we went and wherever we go, our music library follows. The iPhone release set the precedent for the next decade of smartphones. It allowed us to not only consolidate our devices but also to consolidate the control of our lives into a single apparatus. And to think, one of the first dominoes to fall was about a little diner on the corner of Broadway and 112th street.

Source: https://www.soundguys.com/podcast-the-mp3-revolution-17850/

How the MP3 Accidentally Destroyed the Music Industry

The MP3 holds a place in our collective imagination as the de facto medium for music listening on our computers and smartphones. Like Kleenex with tissues, the term MP3 is eponymous with digital music files. This is thanks in large part to the havoc that the MP3 wreaked on the music industry starting two decades ago.

The dust has settled and listening to music digitally is now the norm, with artists, labels, and listeners largely seeming to have accept streaming as the new industry model. It’s easy to take for granted what exactly we are listening to when we stream something on our laptops and on our phones. Chances are what you’re hearing isn’t even an MP3.

Weirdly enough, the MP3 is a proprietary encoding protocol protected by copyright. As such, Spotify by and large favors the open–source compression codec Ogg Vorbis. Apple has favored AAC since the original launch of iTunes. YouTube’s audio is compressed in AAC too.

What exactly is a codec and why are there so many of them? Codec is an abbreviation of coder–decoder. In the context of audio, it’s the procedure that turns audio into a digital file and back again.

MP3 is a standard for audio compression that shrinks the size of a music file without, ideally, any perceptible loss in sound quality. Think back to how little space computers must’ve had back in the late ‘80s, when development on the MP3 first began.

If the 300–plus GB hard drive on your computer is just about full now, you can imagine how crucial it must have been to compress digital audio files for easy storage and transfer back then.

One second of stereo music on a CD takes up about 1.4 megabits. MP3 encoding yields a file that’s 12 times smaller.
Birth of the MP3


Moving Picture Experts Group

In 1988, The Moving Picture Experts Group convened to develop standards for audio and video compression, including a way to get video onto CDs. MP3 would be one of the results of the committee’s work.

The MP3 protocol compresses audio using the principles of psychoacoustics, which is the science of sound perception. This sounds lofty but what it means is that MP3 encoding uses the quirks of human hearing to lop off or heavily approximate audio information we can’t really register anyway.

The idea for using psychoacoustics to guide digital audio compression had been kicked around for awhile, dating back to the late ‘70s. In fact back in the 1910s, studies sponsored by AT&T on human hearing and perception were used to figure out how to compress the signal of phone calls to increase phone line capacities.

Karlheinz Brandenburg, a professor at the Fraunhofer Institute who was one of the lead developers of the MP3 and a principal advocate for using psychoacoustics, thought that the group had locked down the algorithm for the MP3 by 1988.

But the human voice would act as a sticking point.

Brandenburg first tested the MP3 on Suzanne Vega’s acapella for “Tom’s Diner,” used by many audiophiles to test sound systems thanks to the warm recording of Vega’s voice. MP3 compression mangled that recording, leading to Brandenburg and AT&T researchers listening to the track something like 1,000 times to get the compression right.

By 1992, the MP3 was functioning. In hindsight, it’s clear the video CD format was never going anywhere. A few years later, however, the group that developed the MP3 earmarked the relatively new–fangled internet as the ideal forum for the use of the MP3.

If this seems like an excellent bit of foresight, you’d be half–right. Most likely, nobody guessed what communities of internet denizens with ample time on their hands and technical knowhow were capable of.

The MP3 was and still is a proprietary format. The initial business model anticipated for the MP3 worked like this: encoding tools for turning an audio file into MP3 would require expensive licensing fees and would be used by large companies.

Decoding tools, which would turn MP3 back into audio you could listen to, would be widely available and cheap. This isn’t the case any more, obviously. The MP3 unleashed a torrent of easily pirated music. The same force that would spearhead the rise of Napster and file sharing would also undo the MP3’s own business model.
Hackers Find the MP3

By the mid ‘90s, the Warez Scene – an online community of computer wizards who took pleasure in cracking and distributing copyrighted material – was already mature and thriving. It only took until 1997 before the ability to encode MP3 was freed from its expensive software license.

In what amounts to the kind of rapid–fire, intercontinental travelogue only the internet could foster, an Australian student bought encoding software from Germany with a stolen credit card from Taiwan. He then cracked the software, uploaded it to a server in Sweden and began distributing it to U.S. universities via an FTP site.

That FTP contained a read–me referring to the program as freeware “thanks to Fraunhofer,” referring to the Fraunhofer Institute where the protocol was developed.

One of the first MP3 piracy groups, Compress ‘Da Audio distributed their first pirated MP3 that summer via IRC, a chat room system. The track was “Until It Sleeps,” by Metallica.

There was a dogged determination among these pirating crews. They built elaborate networks and competed with each other to leak big albums, which were then uploaded to topsites — high-speed secret servers — that other members of the Warez Scene could access.

With a few exceptions, this community wasn't interested in profiting from the file sharing. As described in a fascinating New Yorker article about this wave of piracy, members of the Warez Scene often drew moral distinctions between sharing files on topsites and selling bootlegged copies.

It was a culture that sustained itself on friendly competition and the thrill of leaking.


TLC - Fan Mail

Crews like Rabid Neurosis, or RNS, became especially notorious for their ability to leak marquee records from artist like Eminem and TLC weeks before their release.

Brandenburg and the Fraunhofer Institute tried to do damage control, but Pandora’s box had been opened wide. They lowered the cost of encoders, and soon services were popping up allowing users to rip MP3s off their CDs, but this did nothing to tide the flood.

The stage was set for distributing MP3s freely throughout the web, in the process making MP3 the most widely available and used format for music. By 1997, Brandenburg notes, “I got the impression that the avalanche was rolling and no one could stop it anymore.”
The Digital Plague Spreads

While the stage was being set for the rise of the MP3 and file sharing, the record industry was in the midst of some of its loftiest sales ever years. In the ‘90s and early ‘00s, blockbuster releases sold in the neighborhood of 10 million copies. By the end of the ‘90s, Garth Brooks had enjoyed five separate albums going diamond.

Between 1995 and 2004, there is a nearly unbroken stretch of the year’s top selling records moving more than 5 million copies. The seven top–selling records of 2000 can claim this distinction, too.
Unless you’re Adele, these kind of sales are just not replicable these days."

Unless you’re Adele, whose last album 25 beat the long–standing record for strongest first week sales held by NSYNC’s No Strings Attached, these kind of sales are just not replicable these days.

The turn–of–the–millennium boom years for the record industry were accompanied by mergers and acquisitions among the major labels. This meant that CD printing was consolidated, with fewer physical plants producing them.

Ironically, that consolidating move made leaks ever more common. Fewer facilities meant that the file sharing community needed fewer contacts in order to secure their leaks

The network of IRC and topsites used by the Warez Scene were ultimately inefficient, inaccessible, and for legal reasons, carefully guarded. This kept leaked releases relatively contained.

Napster would light the match that set fire to fuel spilled by the MP3 and networks of dedicated leakers.

Napster was invented in 1999 by an 18–year old college dropout and Warez enthusiast named Shawn Fanning. With Napster, Fanning pioneered the peer–to–peer file–sharing platform, allowing users to exchange files directly with each other. At its peak, Napster had 80 million registered users.





Napster's barebones approach to filesharing

We’re all familiar what follows. There were the subsequent lawsuits spearheaded by devastatingly rich rock stars like Lars Ulrich, major label hand–wringing, and heavy–handed litigation by the RIAA.

We have the benefit of hindsight for criticizing the industry’s supposed shortsightedness. But it’s illuminating regardless to revisit the way the MP3 revolution was spoken about in 2000, at once a banner year for the music industry as well as the year of Napster.
The Already-Shifting Music Industry

Research groups were already anticipating the death of record stores and the coming ability for listeners around the world to tap into what Charles C. Mann, in an article for The Atlantic, was already describing as “a vast cloud of music” via the internet.

Even industry leaders like Edgar Bronfman Jr., then head of Universal, was anticipating the rise of what some starry–eyed commenters called the heavenly jukebox.

“Soon,” he declared in a speech that May, “a few clicks of your mouse will make it possible for you to summon every book ever written in any language, every movie ever made, every television show ever produced, and every piece of music ever recorded.”

How this would happen in a way that preserved the economic interests of media companies in general and record labels in particular was still unclear.

A Berkeley economist had the somewhat prescient vision of corporate patronage which sidestepped the traditional industry entirely. Why can’t Coca-Cola, which then had higher annual revenues than the entire music industry, market music as an advertising campaign?

Instead, the industry opted for draconian legal responses and numerous failed attempts to shift towards secured, copy–protected music. These approaches proved ineffective.

Brandenburg, for his part, insisted that any secured format for distributing music on the internet would have would not be compatible with all of the platforms and audio players hitting the market.
Ultimately, it’s the industry’s stunning lack of vision on this front that made the rise of the MP3 so devastating."

But the MP3 solved that problem too well. It was compact, of adequately high sound quality, accessible across platforms, and incredibly easy to reproduce and share.

Ultimately, it’s the industry’s stunning lack of vision on this front that made the rise of the MP3 so devastating.

Again in hindsight, it’s ironic that the new industry standard of streaming (with our Spotifys and YouTubes) was engineered by the same type of plucky tech start–up types who unleashed Napster on the world.

Not that we should get too comfortable with the streaming service landscape we see now. Rdio, Grooveshark, Songza, have all gone to the grave of failed streaming services.

Soundcloud, itself dogged by IP lawsuits, has found itself floundering in its attempts to monetize and compete more directly with Spotify and Apple Music.

Most other services are in bad shape. “Napster” – which is really Rhapsody wearing the necrotized remains of the Napster brand like a Silence of the Lambs-style face mask – has struggled to keep pace with paying subscribers.





Rhapsody's Version Napster


Tidal has been wracked by lawsuits, leadership shuffles, and late payments. Even Spotify, which has the biggest user base, has yet to demonstrate whether the streaming model can sustain itself. Spotify has not turned a profit, while analogues in TV and film, like Netflix, are already profitable.

Competitors like Apple Music or Amazon Music Unlimited or Google Play Music are backed with so much capital that they don’t even have to make money to be sustainable—a relationship not unlike that of the Coca-Cola patronage envisioned more than fifteen years ago.

Even if the MP3 is no longer the principle format we use to listen to music digitally, it's not yet clear that the industry has achieved an equilibrium in the face of the precedent it unleashed.

Source: 2017
https://reverb.com/news/how-the-mp3-accidentally-destroyed-the-music-industry

How Film Restoration Works by Chris Opfer from Howstuffworks

How Film Restoration Works by Chris Opfer from Howstuffworks

Some movies shouldn't be revisited. Johnny Depp fans and other poor, unfortunate souls who sat through "Mortdecai" will never get those 107 minutes of their lives back. The best thing they can do is embark on a Paul Revere-esque mission to warn the moviegoing masses off from the depraved beast marching through their towns from theater to theater. Sure, there are certain flicks that are so bad that some might actually get a kick out of them. Why else would so many frat bros still have "Boondock Saints" posters tacked up on their dorm room walls?

On the other end of the spectrum are films that advance the art form and tell the story of the world in which we live. These are the "Citizen Kanes," the "Casablancas," the "Godfathers" and the "Graduates" of the film industry. When aliens descend on what's left of planet Earth thousands of years from now, these are the movies that we should want them to find. That's not to mention a whole slew of flicks that are worth hanging on to because they inform us about the world, are entertaining or are just plain fun. I don't know about you, but I certainly wouldn't have realized that there's no basement in the Alamo if it wasn't for "Pee Wee's Big Adventure."

Unfortunately, many films have been left by the wayside over the passage of time. According to the U.S. Library of Congress, less than 20 percent of American feature films from the silent era remain intact. Meanwhile, half of the movies produced in the U.S. before 1950 have already been lost.

The good news is that researchers and film buffs are working to restore and preserve the movies that we still have.



Film vs. Digital

Until a couple decades ago, moving images were captured exclusively using photochemical film. You know, the stuff that comes in those big reels and that you have to hand-feed through a projector to get on the big screen. These days, however, more filmmakers are turning digital production techniques to shoot and screen their pictures. While the differences in the final product may be subtle to the untrained eye, the two techniques vary widely.

The film used to capture moving picture images has two components: A light-sensitive emulsion and a plastic base. Here's how Kodak explains it:
An easy way to think of film is to compare it with bread and butter. Think of the bread as the base, the butter as the emulsion. When you hold this combination in your hand, what you feel and see is mostly bread, the base -- not butter, the emulsion. The base (bread) holds and supports the emulsion (butter), the active part of the film.

The emulsion is a type of gelatin composed of silver halide crystals. A camera records images by transferring photons of light onto the film as it rotates behind the lens. The crystals turn into silver metal when exposed to the light and form a photo image during the film development process. The series of photos captured on the film can be seen individually once it's developed and create a moving picture when the film is run through a projector [sources: Kodak, Side by Side].

Digital recording, on the other hand, uses an electronic sensor to capture an image, rather than a chemical process. The light that travels through the camera hits the sensor's pixels, creating a number of individual electronic charges that together create an image. The images are stored as data, which can be transmitted via discs, flash drives and the like [sources: JISC Digital Media, Side by Side].

The film vs. digital debate is currently raging on just about every movie studio lot from New York to LA. Film purists often say that they like the gritty, granular feel that comes with the old-fashioned method. Academy Award-winning cinematographer Wally Pfsiter called switching from film to digital "trading oil paints for a set of crayons." Those who have embraced the technology, meanwhile, tout the immediacy of the process. Instead of shooting a scene and waiting to see what it looks like once the film is developed, directors and actors can see what they have right away. Director Robert Rodriguez has compared digital to film by calling the latter technique "painting with the lights off" [sources: JISC Digital Media, Side by Side].
Size Matters

Cinematographers typically use four different types of film – 65 mm, 35 mm, 16 mm and Super 8. The names refer to the films' "gauge," or width in millimeters. Thirty-five mm is the most commonly used type of film for movies because the size of the photos transfers most easily to the big screen. Sixteen mm is used primarily for lower-budget pictures that are later blown up to 35 mm and for TV. Images shot on 65 mm are usually printed on 70 mm film to get the widescreen feel used in IMAX movies. Cinematographers often turn to Super 8 (8 mm) for a vintage, old, home-movie feel [source: Kodak].



How Film Deteriorates

While the choice between digital film moviemaking may be one of personal preference, what we do know for sure is that film reels have a much higher risk of being damaged or destroyed over time than their video counterparts.

As the plastic and emulsions age and are exposed to elements like light and temperature, colors fade and images may denigrate. The culprit is often something called nitrate deterioration. Until the early 1950s, most American movies were recorded on cellulose nitrate film. When the nitrate deteriorates, film often shrinks and begins to give off various acids that separate the emulsion from the base, yellow the individual still photos and make the film so brittle that it eventually crumbles and turns into dust. High temperatures and humidity can speed this process. While the acetate film versions that followed are also subject to decay, modern polyester film is believed to have a shelf life of hundreds of years [sources: Library of Congress, Kodak].

It's not necessarily the Hollywood classics at risk of being destroyed because many of these films have already been restored and transferred to digital formats. Instead, it's the lesser known independent and avant-garde works, along with old newsreels, documentaries and silent era flicks that have been scattered across the country over the years. Experts say these "orphan films," which were outside the scope of previous restoration and preservation projects, are important because they provide insight into what life was like in the days they were shot and recorded [source: National Film Preservation Foundation].


Restoring Film


The actual restoration work is a treasure hunt of sorts in which film archivists go searching for the early versions of the film that they want to bring back to life. The goal is to create what's called a "pre-print" copy of the original film: a master copy of the film as it once was [sources: UCLA, The Picture Show Man].

That means first locating the cleanest copy of the film that's still available. Under ideal circumstances, that would be the original negative version. That's the film that was actually reeled through the camera and used to capture the images. It's called a negative because the original film captures the image in a backward form that includes only shades of the true colors. It's later used to create a "positive" version that ends up on the screen. You need a negative to make a positive print and a positive to make a negative print. Every duplication means a loss of quality.

For many films, there are various trial, correction and distribution copies that may be floating around and could be used for restoration. More obscure pictures – those with just one or a few copies – are often more difficult to restore because there are simply fewer versions of the film from which to choose. On the other hand, more popular films raise their own hurdles to restoration because of the wear and tear endured by the negative as a result of heavy copying.

Once the various versions of the film are located, the restorer may physically cut and paste them to create a full-length master. Wearing white gloves, he'll open the film can and gently wipe off any mold. Then he'll unwind the film slowly, flattening out any curl. Using special equipment and splicing tape or film cement, he'll join pieces of film together as needed. He'll also repair any broken sprocket holes [sources: NFPF]. The idea is to remove wear and tear so that viewers can enjoy the film in its original form rather than an enhanced version.

For a big-budget movie restoration, the film may go through a device called a wetgate scanner – a scanner that runs the film through a chemical bath that fills in any scratches on the negative. Then the film is converted to a digital image. High-end graphic and editing computers can adjust the pixels so faded color becomes rich; they can also remove damaged frames of film or scratches and dirt on individual frames. This is painstaking work. It may take three or four hours to fix one frame [source: Popular Mechanics].

The audio track may also be enhanced. In the case of the "Jaws" restoration, the mono track was upgraded to include two additional rear speakers, creating a surround sound atmosphere for home viewers [source: Popular Mechanics].

And one last thing after the restoration project is complete: Another negative is created so the film will be properly preserved for posterity.
Author's Note: How Film Restoration Works

Everything I know about film, I owe to Keanu Reeves. That's right: Mr. Whoa. Dude. Bro. Yes, Reeves has left an indelible mark on the history of cinema with roles like the stoned space cadet who travels through time to visit other civilizations and ace his history project in "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure," an older, jock version of the same guy in "Point Break" and an older, hacker version of the same guy in the "Matrix" trilogy. But I'm referring to "Side By Side," the 2012 documentary Reeves produced and narrated about the move away from film moviemaking and the artists on each side of the film-digital debate. This is the type of flick that humble-braggers who like movies would label for "film nerds." They are wrong: I enjoyed it, and I'm one of the coolest people whom I know.
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Sources

    JISC Digital Media. "Introduction to Digital Video." (Jan. 24, 2015) http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/guide/introduction-to-digital-video#v08
    Kodak. "Film Types and Formats." (Jan. 24, 2015) http://motion.kodak.com/motion/uploadedFiles/US_plugins_acrobat_en_motion_newsletters_filmEss_05_Film_Types_and_Formats.pdf
    Kodak. "Understanding Film....The Basics." (Jan. 24, 2015) http://www.kodak.com/global/en/consumer/education/lessonPlans/lessonPlan152.shtml
    Library of Congress. "Preservation Research." (Jan. 23, 2015) http://www.loc.gov/programs/national-film-preservation-board/preservation-research
    Library of Congress. "Preservation Plan." (Jan. 24, 2015) http://www.loc.gov/programs/national-film-preservation-board/preservation-research/film-preservation-plan/
    National Film Preservation Foundation. "Why the NFPF was Created." (Jan. 24, 2014) http://www.filmpreservation.org/about/why-the-nfpf-was-created
    "Side By Side." Directed by Chris Kenneally. Company Films, 2012 (Jan. 24, 2015)
    The Picture Show Man. "Restoration and Preservation." (Jan. 24, 2015) http://www.pictureshowman.com/articles_restprev_negsprints.cfm
    UCLA Film & Television Archive. "About Restoration." (Jan. 24, 2015) https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/restoration/about-restoration
    UCLA Film & Television Archive. "An Interview with Bob Gitt (2006)." (Jan. 24, 2015) https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/restoration/interview-bob-gitt-2006
    UCLA Film & Television Archive. "UCLA Film & Television Archive on Turner Classic Movies." (Jan. 24, 2015) https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/restoration/ucla-film-television-archive-turner-classic-movies

Source: https://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/film-restoration.htm