Digital media

As you all know mp3 music players are now ubiquitious and nearly everywhere and many of have owned several of them.

 

For your post for this Discussion Forum, I would like you to craft a short post where you consider the following question/scenario.

 

Before the iPod was released, there were other mp3 players, but none really caught the imagination of the general public.  But, and here’s a key point, it WAS the time of dialup modems to connect to the Internet and Napster.

 

As Dr. Felten showed, Napster was very, very popular, but it only took off when it did because the mp3 format had already been invented.  Let me explain. 

You have probably heard this song by the Eurythmics:

 

On my CD of this song, the original AAC format version of this song is nearly 40 Mb.  When I compress it down to the Internet MP3 standard 128K compressed format, it goes down to less than 4 Mb.

 

So, I ask you, if you were on a fast 56K dialup modem, how long would it have taken to download this song if NOT in mp3 format?  Would people have had the patience to make Napster the hit that it was? 

 

Similarly, when the first iPod was released, it held a whopping 5 G of data. Or as Steve Jobs put it when announcing it, it lets you put a thousand songs in your pocket. If there had not been the mp3 format, would anybody have paid $400.00 to put roughly 8 uncompressed
 songs in their pocket?

Anyway, I think this scenario illustrates how several seemingly unrelated innovations (mp3 file compression, the Internet, dial-up modems, Napster, networked computers, asleep at the switch media companies, and probably several other things) all came together and disrupted the traditional music industry.

 

So, for this Discussion Forum, I would like you to create a post that, in your own words, ties this all together in a way that makes sense to you.  In other words, tell me, in a more story-oriented fashion, the tale of how all these techno-innovations sort of came together (mp3, digital vs. analog recordings via CDs, the Internet, Napster, Steve Jobs, the iTunes Store, iPods/mp3 players, and you can even include the RIAA if you wish) and make a Discussion Post about it all and include how you use, or don’t use music in your life.