Silly Digital Music Format Scemes

Written August 22. 1999, at 03:00 GMT.

Everyone seems to be afraid of MP3. Several proprietary sound-formats have appeared recently, all hoping to dominate the market and become the next big thing after MP3.

Since none of them is an open-standard they all claim to be technically superior to MP3 in some way. Either they aim to impress the CEOs by adding software locks and copy protection, or they claim their new format is so and so much better compressed than MP3 while still delivering something they call "near CD quality".

All these claims are worthless fluff

The fact is that creating a locked music format is impossible and all digital copy protection systems only irritate the users/listeners.

Furthermore, any claims of reduced near-CD-quality file sizes (true or not) are almost irrelevant - except for the instant wow-effect in the media.

The fact is that the current MP3 format is all at once, present and widely used, open and non-proprietary, and offers small enough file sizes - even with today's limited bandwidth.

Digital music distribution is still in it's infancy, and by the time it becomes really mainstream it won't really matter if the file sizes are 100%, 80% or even 50% of the size of a decent quality MP3 file.

Openness and ease-of use (and distribution) will be the only things that matter.

The Changing Face of Music in RCFoC, is a recent interesting read on the subject of digital music

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