Last week, the “death” of the MP3 was made official by The Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, a division of the state-funded German research institution that bankrolled the MP3’s development in the late ’80s. This is in addition to the rise of high-fi streaming services like Tidal, which cater to listeners who desire the highest possible sounds quality (the MP3 coding format is notorious for degrading the audio quality of music files). While the MP3 held strong as the leading format (at least in terms of prevalence) for many years, as the music industry has moved away from downloads and toward streaming, the ubiquitous file format has become increasingly obsolete. With the rise of iTunes (and illegal file sharing platforms like Napster and LimeWire), MP3 and Digital Rights Management became hot-button topics in the media, as the market for music shifted from the “physical” to the “digital.” Whether or not you knew what they stood for, everyone who listened to music in the earliest days of the 21st century is familiar with the characters “MP3.” MP3 files were the new standard that began to make your CD collection obsolete.
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