Music Format Standards Battle — Bad News For Everyone

Studies

from the yay,-more-anti-consumer-activities dept

Back when there were just MP3s, everything worked well. The quality was good enough for most, the compression was reasonable and everyone could make it work. But, of course, the recording industry freaked out, and now we have a tower of babble of different music file standards — so it should be no surprise that the percentage of music files in the MP3 format on the average hard drive is declining, as some other formats start to make inroads. However, there seem to be a few reasons why this is happening. First, most downloads are MP3s, and people see downloaded MP3s as “disposable” — so they’re deleting them faster than they’re downloading new songs (which gives plenty of weight to the idea that people use file sharing networks for sampling music). Meanwhile, people ripping CDs to digital music files often end up putting them in AAC or WMA because that’s the standard way iTunes and Windows Media Player rip them. However, if you ask people, they simply assume that both players rip to MP3. In some sense, MP3 has just become a generic term for digital music file — which is only going to lead to problems later when the AAC and WMA files don’t behave the same way MP3 files do. Once again, the industry is doing more damage by fragmenting the way in which people store their digital music. There’s no benefit to the end user, but it will lead to confusion and anger — which isn’t the way you should want your customers to feel.