Goodbye MP3?
Our Internet Topic of the Day: Nearly 20 years ago, MP3 conquered the Internet. Now the compression process that brought the music to the network has been disconnected.
What happens?
It has been almost 20 years since the first digital hackers logged into “Napster” with 65k beep modems and waited patiently until a single song made it onto their own hard drive after endless minutes. A few years later, the iPod was all the rage – a thousand songs on one device! MP3 was the future of music.
Now MP3 is dead: the German Fraunhofer Society has announced that no more licenses will be issued for MP3 encoding.
This is primarily a symbolic act. MP3 files and players will continue to work. The Fraunhofer Foundation basically only recognizes what has been a fact for a long time: the days of MP3 are over.
MP3 compression was invented at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in the late 1980s and then further developed and commercialized.
Because it’s interesting?
MP3 hardly plays a role these days – when you download a music file these days, it is usually not in MP3 format. Apple, for example, switched to a different file format a long time ago.
With the iPod, the company had made a significant contribution to the success of the file format. And streaming services like Spotify also use different compression methods. Because today, other compression methods offer significantly better sound quality with an even smaller file size.
It is not clear if MP3 will disappear completely. The fact that the Fraunhofer Foundation ends its licensing program means that everyone can freely work with MP3 encoding. Perhaps the format will even see a small revival as a result.
