A Brief History Of Recorded Music — Part 3

Digital For The Masses

1979 — First Digital Music Player

A young British inventor named Kane Kramer conceptualizes a small portable device that stores and play digital songs (pictured above). The first prototype can only store 3 minutes worth of music. But a more advanced prototype features a hard disk capable of holding one hour.

Kramer envisions stores where people can fill their players with the latest songs. New music is downloaded daily over phone lines from record companies. Sir Paul McCartney invests in the idea. However, disputes follow and the company never fulfills its vision.

1982 — Compact Disc

Philips invents the laser audio disc. The Compact Disc allows for a longer play time: 1 hour and 20 minutes. The scratches of records and hissing from cassettes are gone! The dynamic range is greatly extended too. The new technology is wildly embraced by consumers. The decline of music revenue of previous years is stopped…then sales soar to new heights.

Portable CD players solve for consumers the dilemma of having to purchase cassettes for mobility or records for better sound at home.

The Compact Disc marks the last time consumers are offered an undeniable advancement over past listening technologies. Future innovations will instead be driven by convenience, device ubiquity and cost reduction. A regression in sound quality will ensue.

This is arguably the last chapter of the “music industrial complex” of expensive recording studios, mass manufacturing, distribution channels, shipping and inventories. The home studios and the Internet revolutions are looming.

1993 — MP3

The Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) releases the famously disruptive digital audio compression standard. The technology reduces the size of digital recordings by making clever use of the imperfections of the human ear. Audio subtleties that the ear cannot perceive well are discarded, saving on data storage. The technology is originally meant for professional broadcasters. Most consumer computers cannot handle audio yet.

The Fraunhofer Society releases the next year its famous music encoding/decoding software. The file extension “.mp3” is chosen. This is the watershed moment that will enable music distribution for the foreseeable future. Better codecs like ogg and AAC will supplant mp3 but the principle is the same.

MP3 portends of a future where artists and consumers can interact directly and bypass music industry distribution. The copyright model will soon be under assault. Digital music and personal computing are on rapidly converging trajectories, but few see it yet.

The technology changes the way music is produced in the studio. Audio engineers now optimize sound for best digital encoding by reducing audio nuances. Digital encoding has the same effect on the visual arts. In movie-making, the use of fades between scenes is now discouraged because they cause ugly compression blotches on screen.

1995 — The Loudness War

By the mid 90’s the CD technology is well understood. It’s known by now that loud sounds are encoded with better audio definition than quiet ones. But this leads to an unintended new pursuit in the next decade by audio engineers and artists.

In a series of one-upmanship, bands engage in increasing the overall audio loudness of their CD compared to other bands. This is achieved by applying very aggressive dynamic range restrictions, boosting everything up to the red line and flattening away subtleties. The Loudness War will unintentionally condition the ears of consumers to the lower audio quality of the looming mp3 era.

Coincidently or not, the demand for hifi home systems starts to decline. Consumers are divesting their entertainment dollars away from music to game consoles and such.

1996 — Internet Pioneers

The Internet Underground Music Archive is born from the nascent Internet. It enables unsigned artists to publish their music online. This is the start of song downloads and streaming. The streaming technologies are fairly advanced for the time, some universities experimenting with ip multicasting. It will later revert to a simpler HTTP technology to enable play on web browsers.

IUMA is acquired by eMusic. A decade later SoundCloud will follow up on this important mission for indie artists.

1997 — The First MP3 Player

A little known Korean company called Saehan releases the world’s first mp3 player: the MPMan F10. It has a miniature 3GB hard disk capable of holding almost a thousand songs. It sells for $599 and is ultimately a commercial failure.

However this isn’t the end, not by a long shot. The Rio is launched next by Diamond Multimedia and is a big hit at Christmas in 1998. A Cupertino-based company with a fruit logo is paying close attention.

1998 — Napster

The notorious peer-to-peer startup is founded at the timely intersection of multimedia personal computers and faster internet dialup speeds. Napster operates by keeping a catalog of the mp3 songs users have on their computer. When searching for a song, Napster connects you to users from whom you can download it. Napster doesn’t store any music itself.

The new technology ignites a resurgence in music interest from consumers. Popular hits are widely exchanged of course, but also hard to find songs that have gone out of print. The copyright model seems now hopelessly broken, even non-sensical. Music is now free to spread at the speed of light.

Napster portends of a nascent media world where the business value is shifting away from content-making. Indeed, affordable digital devices will soon enable regular folks to compete with Big Media for viewership online. The business future will be about owning the tentacular social graph between content and users. Facebook will later take off on that notion.

Perhaps the most damaging effect of the Napster debacle is the creeping perception of music as a bare, stripped down experience. Songs are now intangible bits of data with no visual or tactile dimensions; no artworks, lyrics sheets or posters. Audio quality also takes a step backward. This regression in value will be a turning point for consumers.

1999 — The Music Revenue Swan Song

Meanwhile the millennium ends with the highest music revenue ever at 21.5 billion dollars (US, adjusted for inflation) driven by the 17 years successful run of the Compact Disc. But a sharp decline is afoot. These heights in revenue will not be seen again in the next decades.

Vinyl was a technological leap forward providing consumers unprecedented value in high-fidelity. Cassette technology that followed (light blue above) was an advancement in convenience. It enabled mobility but sound quality wasn’t quite as good.

The Compact Disc was the new music technology consumers were pining for. A tidal wave of music revenue followed (orange above). But the shoehorning of these digital songs into the Internet age will prove to be a convenience advancement once again. And a mixed bag for artists and labels.

But for now the new millennium seems full of entertainment promises, barring any sudden collapse of society due to Y2K. New internet-capable smartphones are poised to take over the world!

In the upcoming Part 4 we’ll see Kane Kramer’s 1979 vision of music devices and digital stores finally comes to life.

In Part 2 we explored the magnetic tape revolution and how it changed music expression forever.

About The Author

Pierre is a software engineer for a major computer maker based in Cupertino. He likes to speculate about innovations in various domains such as aviation, cloud computing, AI and next-generation music streaming. He holds an FAA pilot license for airplanes, helicopters and sUAS.

All opinions and speculations presented here are strictly his own, and are unrelated to his day job and employer.