1 - A Brief History of the MP3 Format

I thought about telling a bit of the history of MP3 at the start of this post, but mp3.org already does that excellently. For that reason, I'll hold back and keep the introduction short.

MPEG-1 Audio Layer III, also known as MP3, is an audio coding format developed in the 1990s in Germany. It uses lossy compression, so file sizes shrink by around 90% while keeping an audio quality that is acceptable for most people.

For those who know their audio, I'll leave a brief, and I mean very brief, rundown here:

• MP3 has the file extension .mp3
• Its MIME type is audio/mpeg
• The compression is lossy (psychoacoustic)
• Its bit rates are 32-320 kbps
• Its sample rates are 16, 22.05, 24, 32, 44.1, 48 kHz
• It supports Mono, Stereo and Joint Stereo channels
• It is standardized in ISO/IEC 11172-3 (1993)
• The frame size is 1152 samples

Phew! Now that we know MP3 and are superficially familiar with it, let's get into the history.

2 - The MP3 Boom, Piracy and Sharing Culture

With the rise of MP3 in the late 1990s and early 2000s came music piracy. People shared music in every way possible. Since an .mp3 file is small, sharing was relatively fast for the bandwidth of the time. Everyone was happy, except the music industry.

Imagine having the discographies of your favorite artists saved on your computer, taking up almost no space. Imagine being able to share songs via torrent with anyone in the world. That was the reality, and the music industry wasn't loving it.

The labels blamed the people who shared, the artists blamed the industry, and us, the normal, invisible people? Well! We know artists make very little from selling music. The labels always get the biggest slice of the cake. The most famous artists usually make their money from advertising and live shows, not from music sales. The music itself is their work of art. It's their image, fame and recognition that generate revenue.

The labels, on the other hand, made and still make a lot of money from selling music and copyrights. They were not happy with digital piracy.

3 - The Fall of MP3 and the Peak of Streaming

The industry, always smarter than us mere mortals, realized that people didn't want to steal music, they wanted access. That's how the music industry, together with tech companies, started popularizing streaming platforms around 2010. MP3 gradually fell out of use for most people. It was much easier to pay for a subscription and have an online catalog with thousands of songs than to organize your own local library. It was easy, but was it ideal? It had to be. The industry pressured the authorities to make digital piracy a crime. Sharing music became a crime, and you no longer owned what you paid for, unless you wanted to buy the physical album.

At this point, which extends to the day this post was published, the music industry has the public's taste in the palm of its hands. Daily new releases in high fidelity, combined with people's conformity, made streaming the status quo of music publishing.

4 - The Consumerist Hoax of “Hi-Fi for Everyone”

What do we have to say about high fidelity, or Hi-Fi? Listen up! High-fidelity files are very useful for musicians, music producers and DJs, because the raw file keeps every nuance of the original recording, even the imperceptible ones. But do music consumers really need to listen to Hi-Fi music in .wav or .flac formats? Can music lovers even tell the difference between a .flac and an .mp3?

NPR will test you with this article (take the test and come back here to finish reading, don't cheat on me): Most people can't hear the difference between WAV and MP3.

My score was 1/5, which means I can't tell an MP3 from anything else, and for me that's great. I love MP3: it's compact, it takes up little space and it has a cool name.

Do you know who else benefits from Hi-Fi culture for users? The software and hardware industry. If you need to keep a music library in .flac, you obviously need storage! A lot of storage! And storage is expensive!

See how the industries talk to each other and they all win: the music industry creates the demand for high-fidelity audio, the software industry builds streaming services to deliver it to users who want to pay. The users who don't want to pay download pirated .flac files, but for that the hardware industry will have to sell them storage! A lot of storage!

The cycle is complete, everyone wins, except the consumer.

5 - Why Abandon Streaming and Have Your Own MP3s?

In reality, the consumer gains little from an infinite library laid out for their consumption. They lose the appreciation of music, the appreciation of an album, a work of art. On music streaming services, the consumer has at their disposal far more than they could listen to in a lifetime, and the excess of information ends up making the musical experience ephemeral. They don't feel the music, they won't remember the first time they heard the album, the goosebumps on their arms, because they no longer listen to albums, they listen to random playlists and daily updates.

Bad songs, even in Hi-Fi, are still bad.

6 - Music Player 3

The habit of listening to a whole album and appreciating a work of art is what I bring with Music Player 3, the music player I created for Linux. Besides being frequently optimized to use fewer system resources, it has a built-in lyrics reader via .srt files, a minimalist design so the focus stays on the music and not on the interface, and internationalization into 15 languages besides English. I invite you, dear reader, to download Music Player 3 and listen to that album you have saved locally, the album you love the most, the album that gives you goosebumps.