Playback and payback series; (part 15) Panic in the Suites – Napster, Grokster and the Last Kazaa (I)

Strangely, the next great panic attack came as sort of a delayed reaction, though one that Weiss foresaw, in terms of the ability to “clone” digital music, if not in the exact same medium. The cause of this panic was another new format that initially started in the music business’s sister industry, the movie business.

The movie business loved the whole idea of digital audio, but they couldn’t fit that much information onto the soundtrack of a film. German engineer Karlheinz Brandenburg came up with a solution, a digital audio compression protocol that basically trimmed some of the frequencies that were beyond the power of the human ear to perceive and most speakers to reproduce, and further compacted musical data so that a song that might take up 30 megabytes of information on a CD (which generally could hold up to 700 megabytes of data) shrank down to about 3 megabytes of digital data.

He brought this idea to the Motion Picture Experts Group, which adopted Brandenburg’s Audio Layer 3 compression protocol – MPEG  3 for short, or MP3 for shorter, based on the file extension used for these pieces of compressed musical data – as the standard for digital audio compression for film.

Brandenburg’s company decided to make the protocol “open source.” Not that it mattered much in the early 1990s, when computers were comparatively puny and the code would have over-taxed them. Initially, it took a dedicated device to actually compress the files.

There is an axiom in the computer world, however, called Moore’s Law, after Intel founder Gordon Moore. In 1965, Moore predicted that the number of transistors that would fit on a micro-processor chip would double every year, thereby doubling the power and speed of the computer. Moore’s Law is a variation on this idea; it basically states that computing power doubles every one or two years. It took five years of this doubling before the higher-powered personal computer could deal with the algorithm for MP3, at which point (around 1995) high-end computer users had the digital muscle needed to “rip” digital CD audio into MP3 files on their own personal computers.

By this time, another development in computing became more and more commonplace. Started as a means for scientists to send data back and forth with relative rapidity, the Internet had been in use by the academic and military communities since the mid-1970s. When the graphical web browser Mosaic was introduced in 1993, however, this potential wellspring of data became more accessible to the computer literate.

This included college students, especially those studying the burgeoning fields of computer engineering and science (in order to perpetuate Moore’s Law). These students discovered Brandenburg’s open-source algorithm, and suddenly, between the high-speed connectivity available on college campuses and this new ability to compress a song encoded onto a CD down to a tenth of its original size, digital music zinged back and forth between students’ computers over the campus networks.

While aware of the phenomenon, the record companies didn’t care too much about it at first. After all, it was only a bunch of college kids, and they couldn’t get the songs away from the computer. People who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. In the 1920s, when radio started its ascendance, the record companies took the attitude, “Why would anyone want to listen to someone else playing records for them when they could play their own?”

However, during the Depression if people had a radio, they didn’t really need to spend 75c apiece on records. Radio provided enough entertainment to make them forget their troubles for a few minutes. In 1921, record sales had topped $100 million. By 1931, they slid to under $20 million, a fall caused, in part, by the record industry’s own hubris in ignoring the appeal of radio.

The industry hadn’t lost this hubris some 70 years later, which shouldn’t surprise people. It ignored the digital transfer of music in 1995 just like it had the rise of radio in 1925 – at its peril. If the record companies had embraced this technology back in 1995, figured out the many ways it could be exploited and then exploited them, the music business might be a much healthier, happier place (in economic terms). Everyone could easily access music instantly anywhere, either by subscription or per piece. Music would have the same kinds of business precautions that prevent the average person from “ripping” a DVD – though new programs to circumvent these safeguards arise faster than the industry can retool to defeat them.