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- MP3: Music Distribution
- Hits the Net
How serious is this new music medium? It has the record companies running scared. Should audiophiles be paying attention too?
(Reprinted from issue 55 of UHF Magazine. To purchase the issue, click here.)
The machine itself remains fiction, but the technology is here, and a lot of people are using it. Downloading music is common enough that already record companies claim to be losing "billions of dollars" to the Internet. We'll return to the claim a little later.
The key to the new boom in downloadable music is known as MP3...short for MPEG 3. It makes possible what would otherwise be unthinkable: the equivalent of pushing an elephant through a garden hose.
A full length Compact Disc contains as much as 650 megabytes of data. Let's say some kind soul has turned that into a computer file so that you can download it into your computer. You have a reasonable fast phone link to the Internet (as most people have), and you're averaging let us say 4000 bytes per second. Divide 650 million by 4000, and you have 162,500 seconds...about 45 hours. That's nearly two days of continuous download...and for most people with slower phone links that can stretch to four days.
Enter lossy compression. This is different from lossless compression familiar from the computer world (Zip and Stuffit), or from the proposed DVD-Audio standard. Lossy compression actually discards information which is deemed to be unimportant, or at least expendable. That's the principle behind ATRAC (used on MiniDisc), AC-3 (the technical name of Dolby Digital) and even DTS. Dolby Digital, for instance, operates with a mere 18% of the original information. The MPEG 3 standard goes beyond that, discarding 90% of the information, and reconstituting the signal with just 10%.
(MPEG stands for "motion picture expert group," an industry committee which set up compression standards with video in mind. Because MPEG 3 provides so much compression, it has been adopted by the online community as the ideal way to push music through the Internet.)
But we're still dealing with plump files. Our 45 hour download has been reduced to 4.5 hours, still a long time to wait for your new CD. True, the price is right (free, except for connect time if any), but then what?
Well, then you need to store the music somewhere. A 650 Mb file (assuming you've downloaded a whole disc, not just one song) will take up a big chunk of expensive hard disc space. What do you with the music once you have it? Listen once and throw it away?
And the best-known MP3 sites (such as www.mp3.com) have artists you may well listen to only once. Most are unknowns, and most of those are deservedly unknown. They put individual songs on the Net for free download in the hope that you'll want to order a real CD. Sure! Most material available in MP3 is composed of exactly such samples: individual songs, not whole albums.
So what about that industry claim of billions of dollars of losses? That is of course based on something different: the posting on the Net of commercial recordings. That's illegal, but it is certainly being done.
A recent Toronto newspaper columnist wrote about the existence of pirated MP3 material, but added that he had spent three days looking for it, and had not found a single song. He must not yet have gotten the hang of the search engines. We used the Google search engine and looked for "Céline Dion" and "MP3." We turned up dozens of sites which had countless songs by Dion. The same sites offered free downloads of Janet Jackson, Madonna, Fiona Apple, Guns'n'Roses, Alanis Morrisette, and numerous others. The best-known sites don't offer that, of course, and they may even "warn" you about illegal copyrighted material, but they have links to sites that have links to sites that are on the very edge of the pirate culture. We brushed past links on the latter dealing with hacker scripts, defeating security, etc.
You know when you're getting to the right place, because the URL's have numbers, no word names, and most of them are FTP sites showing only folders, with no attempt to pretty them up with html coding.
Actually, the word "free" is misleading. These FTP sites
don't include instructions — typically you'll get those on an
associated chat site or Usenet group. The first folder may even
be titled "upload," and the rule is that you upload one piece
of commercial music for each one you download (that of course
doubles your on-line time).
And the pirate sites are busy, no mistake about that. We
had a good deal of difficulty getting into the ones dedicated
to the songs of major artists, even outside peak surfing hours.
Of course, with files that large visitors can tie up a site for
a long time.
So are record companies losing billions? That claim appears
to be right off the wall. Does someone grabbing Dion's My Heart Will Go On then cancel plans to buy the record? It is every bit as likely
that or she, having listened to the sample, will want to have
the whole album. And the Net pipeline is just too narrow to be
scooping away billions. So far.
The challenge to record companies
The developers of legitimate MP3 sites would like the big
record companies to make their own recordings available in that
format, against payment, of course. Will it happen? At the moment
the companies are reluctant, convinced that the MP3 culture is
a pirate culture, and that they must beat it, not join it. Some
have actually obtained injunctions against legitimate distributors
of MP3 technology. At the same time, they actually send free copies
of their recordings to FM stations, which play them on air, from
where they can be recorded on millions of boom boxes in real time
and without lossy compression! And not a court injunction in sight.
At some point record companies will have to find a fatter
pipeline and begin doing for themselves what the pirates are doing
without their approval.
The sound
We're all audiophiles here, right? So is MP3 a source we
should be thinking about?
One popular site says that "the quality of reproduction reaches
CD quality effortlessly." It doesn't, of course, not with 90%
of the information gone, but people who get most of their music
from portable cassette players will find it wonderful. The Pontis
MPlayer3 (the device advertised on that site and shown at the
start of this article) looks like a small Walkman, and comes with
software for downloading music. It plays through headphones with
no moving parts. The Diamond Rio 3 (the target of one of those
injunctions) is the best known of the players. It sells for $200
US with 32 Mb of memory on a card.
And there's the catch. A 32 Mb memory card gives you about
32 minutes of music. It's not what we would call a record library.
At the present state of the art, MP3 has mainly hobby appeal.
For pirates, there is a thrill in defeating the rich record companies,
and getting hold of something forbidden. As technology develops,
it will become a powerful tool for giving us all access to the
music of the world.
Until then, it's a game. Memo to record execs: lighten up,
people.