Daily Archives: June 17, 2019

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How the Music Business Missed the Internet

Kids today wouldn’t recognize the internet of the 1990s.  Access was metered by service providers and connections were largely made over slow telephone lines.  Still, it had taken off as a medium, and people were finding new ways to use it.  More to the point, they were finding ways to capitalize on it.

Everyone, that is, except the record labels.  At first they ignored it.  Then they despised it.

Early on, artists and fans built websites to promote music.  Given the lack of usable bandwidth, posting actual music was nearly impossible.  A five-minute song consumed 50MB of data, which was completely unworkable over a 56KB connection.

Then a frustrated German engineer introduced a format that could compress that song down to less than 5MB.  He distributed the compression program freely, and the MP3 format was born.  Music enthusiasts were quick to embrace it, and the next logical step came with file sharing programs, the most famous of which was Napster.

Continued...