MP3s killed the Walkman

Everyday music listeners may not think much of it now, but the creation of the MP3 file in the late ‘80s and ‘90s may have played one of the single most important roles in widening music distribution for mass consumption of any single new technological innovation to date.

MP3 is actually an abbreviation for “MPEG Audio Layer III.” The MPEG part of that abbreviation is yet another abbreviation, this time referring to the Moving Picture Experts Group, an alliance of groups created by the International Organization for Standardization and the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits and tasked with setting standards around digital media encoding. According to NPR, the concept behind the MP3 everyone knows today traces its roots to 1982 but it was deemed technically impossible until the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. The .mp3 file extension still used by many today traces its first birthday to July 14, 1995.

The MP3 was slow to take off in a world dominated by CDs and may actually owe some of its eventual ubiquity to a ‘90s internet pirate. In an interview with NPR, Karlheinz Brandenburg—referred to by some as the “father of the MP3”—said the process of “decoding” MP3s and making them usable for music listeners was essentially hijacked by an Australian student who purchased a professional encoding software for MP3 using a stolen credit card. He then allegedly broke down the software’s inner workings and posted them on a Swedish site with a read-me file titled, “freeware thanks to Fraunhofer.”

“He gave away our business model,” Brandenburg said in a 2011 interview with NPR. “We were completely not amused.” Brandenburg went on to say the MPEG groups tried to hunt down the leaker but the software had spread to a point where it was bigger than its creators could control.

“It was in ‘97 when I got the impression that the avalanche was rolling and no one could stop it anymore,” Brandenburg added. “But even then I still sometimes have the feeling like is this all a dream or is it real, so it’s clearly beyond the dreams of earlier times.”

The stolen business model would lay the groundwork for the widespread adoption of relatively tiny music files and portable MP3 players. Brandenburg may have missed out on a payday, but Apple made money hand-over-fist.