MP3 over internet is changing recording industry

August 27, 2007 on 2:08 pm | In Entertainment

In only the past ten years the developments in music on the internet
have been astounding. We have seen the development of such
technologies as napster, MP3 and many more. The internet has lead to
the wide spread dissemination of music, making any type of music
available to anybody in the world. This essential idea is why it has
been so successful. Everyday the internet is expanding more and more
and this is why the idea of music on the internet will grow and grow
over time. Of late there has been much talk of free music on the
internet - is it fair to the recording artists?
This is one area which will need to be
settled before internet music is recognized as a viable medium.

MP3, an acronym for MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, is one of the most popular
digital audio encoding and compression formats being used nowadays and
is apparently making an enormous impact on how people store, listen
and share music of different genres. It is even now regarded as a
standard technology used in greatly reducing the amount of data used
to represent audio without altering the uncompressed audio’s sound
quality when played.

MP3 digital music is very versatile. It can be played using your
personal computer or a laptop; it can be played through a portable,
small and light MP3 player; it can be decompressed and recorded on a
compact disk; and can be easily downloaded via the Internet. Through
several software, which are also available for free, you can easily
create MP3 digital music from other digital audio formats.

Music distribution using MP3 compression through the Internet has
become an important happening and a major concern of the recording
industry. MP3 is just one of many forms of compression that is
available for audio. At this time it happens to be wildly popular and
is likely to remain so. You can easily download mp3 music
of any genre through numerous www sites. The
popularity MP3 is driving changes in the music industry that will
bring a leveling of income to composers and performers, increase in
their share of gross revenues, and drastically increase the number of
composers and performers that are accessible to the music purchasing
public.

After MP3 as finished remodeling the recording industry, the recording
industry will consist of a three players:

1. Remnants of the current recording industry.
2. Internet companies that sell CDs.
3. Internet companies that sell individual recordings.

First there will be the remnants of the current recording industry.
This area will contain the fewest artists
and will operate much like today’s
recording industry operates. The major difference will be that the
ease of creating and distributing unauthorized recordings will limit
how successful any artist can be. The more successful the artist the
higher the percentage of unauthorized recordings being passed around.
Efforts to create a copy proof format will fail because at some point
in getting the audio from the CD to the speaker the audio has to be
converted into an analog signal that can drive the speaker. This
analog signal is in the computer in digital form before it is sent to
the audio card and can easily be recaptured and converted into any
format without loss of quality. In the worst case the line output can
be patched into the line input and still have minimal loss of quality.
The loss of quality would be nothing compared to copying cassette
tapes. And after the first digital copy is made then all subsequent
copies will have the same quality as the first.