At the end of the ’90s, the recorded music industry was swimming, drowning in money thanks to increasing sales of high-margin compact discs. Times were so good that no one bothered to follow up on stories of a new technology called “MP3” that was allowing music fans to trade digital music files quickly, easily and illegally online.
Within a few years, the industry was in a full-blown panic as sales fell, rosters were trimmed and jobs were lost. The industry spent the next 15 years trying to adjust and adapt to the new digital realities.
There were many people and things that contributed to this near extinction-level event: Napster and its progeny, a failure of the music industry’s imagination and, improbably, the National Hockey League.
MP3 technology was the product of a team led by Karlheinz Brandenberg at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany. In 1988, they began work on a way to efficiently send audio down a plain old copper telephone wire, a medium that wasn’t capable of much bandwidth. But by carefully applying the theories of psychoacoustics — the idea that louder sounds mask quieter ones, thereby making the quieter ones inaudible and thus superfluous — digital audio files could be compressed to one-tenth of their original size.
The Fraunhofer pitched their compression algorithm to international technical standards bodies under the name Motion Picture Experts Group, Layer 3, or “MPEG-3” for short.
The German group did not do well. Other codecs couldn’t shrink files as much, but the mathematics of the competing algorithms were less complex, didn’t require as much computing power (hey, this was the ’80s and ’90s), and sounded as good as MPEG-3s in their shrunken state. As the defeats piled up, funding was threatened and Brandenburg and his people were told to pack it in and move on to some other project.
Then an unlikely saviour appeared. Steve Church ran a company called Telos. He was looking for ways to improve audio quality of remote broadcasts. Back then, remote broadcasts used a telephone line from the broadcast location back to the studio. It worked, but because of the bandwidth issues of copper phone lines, the audio had an annoying tinniness to it. Church realized that MPEG-3 technology might be the solution.
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Back up. Getting the MPEG-3 algorithm tweaked just right required a lot of trial and error. The most famous test bed for the Fraunhofer people was Tom’s Diner, a two-minute a capella single by Suzanne Vega. If they could get a compressed version of a simple and pure vocal performance to sound as good as a full-sized digital file, they knew they’d have a winner. What is less known is that they also used other less-musical audio in their trial-and-error testing.
The Fraunhofer crew experimented with compressing many different genres of music, recordings of people talking fast and those who spoke with accents, bird calls, crowd noise, jet engines and, curiously, the sounds of a hockey game. Bernard Grill, a computer programmer on the team, had determined that the sounds of a hockey game — the crowd, skates scraping the ice, pucks booming off the boards and so on — were very hard to compress with accuracy and without audible glitches. By using field recordings made at German hockey games, Grill was able to fine-tune the MPEG-3 algorithm.
This is one of the things that interested Church because his broadcasting interests extended to the equipment used for NHL play-by-play. He had several hundred audio streaming boxes called Zephyrs that were licensed to the NHL. The lockout of 1994-95 gave him a chance to distribute Zephyrs running MPEG-3 compression. On Jan. 20, 1995, the first day of the shortened season, Church had a Zephyr installed for the broadcast crew doing the play-by-play of a game between the Chicago Blackhawks and the Detroit Red Wings.
The audio quality was astoundingly good. It was far superior to what listeners heard using the old way of using telephone lines and it was exponentially cheaper than using satellites. It wasn’t long before Zephyrs were installed in every NHL rink. The only way for hockey to sound better was to be in the building.
This was the break the Fraunhofer group was looking for. Buoyed by this success, an application was written for personal computers. Grill was able to code an MPEG-3 encoder that fit on a 3.5-inch, 1.44-megabyte floppy disk. That was the first step to allowing everyday consumers to create their own MPEG-3 files. And Intel had just introduced its new, more powerful Pentium chips, the processing power required by an MPEG-3 encoder. And because all Windows machines dictate that each file format must have a three-character extension for its file system, MPEG-3 was shortened to “.mp3.”
Back then, installing Windows on a PC was a laborious process, requiring the swapping in and out of dozens of 3.5-inch floppies. The solution was to introduce a new drive to the home PC market: the CD-ROM. Installing Windows on a PC became as simple as dropping a single disc in the CD-ROM drive and letting the machine do its thing.
It wasn’t long before music fans realized that a CD-ROM was just a CD player and that CDs were just data discs containing digital music files. As hard drives got bigger, it was possible to rip a CD to a computer for instant access later. Now that Fraunhofer had made its MP3 encoder available to all, more music could be stored on a hard drive. What’s more is that when connected to this new thing called the “internet,” it was a snap to transfer songs from one machine to another like any other digital file.
Such trading and transfers were slow at first — anyone miss those old dial-up modems? — but as broadband access spread from companies and institutions to homes, things exploded. And with the introduction of Napster on June 1, 1999, everyone got into the act.
Had Church not convinced the NHL to take a chance on this new technology in his Zephyr boxes, it’s likely that the Fraunhofer group would have abandoned its project and another compression algorithm would have become the worldwide standard. And while it was a matter of time before someone figured out a way to trade music files online, would it have been as easy?
The biggest competitor to MPEG-3 in the standards fight was MPEG-2, championed by a company called Musicam. Its tech worked, but in some cases, it took up to six hours to rip a single CD. And would Musicam have made its encoder available to the consumer for nothing? Would they have found their own solution? Would companies like Saeheen and Diamond Multimedia have released the first MP3 players? And would Apple have dived into iTunes and the iPod?
It’s possible that the file-trading crisis would have been kicked a little further down the road for the recorded music industry. We might have ended up in a completely different sort of digital era.
When the puck dropped that night at the Joe Louis Arena, who could have guessed that the Wings’ 4-1 win not only ended the players’ lockout but also changed the future of music forever?
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