At the end of the 90s, the recorded music industry was swimming, drowning In money thanks to the increase in sales of compact records with a high margin. The times were so good that no one cared to follow the stories of a new technology called “MP3” which allowed music fans to exchange digital musical files quickly, easily and illegally online.
In a few years, the industry was in a panic in its own right as sales fell, the lists were cut and jobs were lost. The industry has spent the next 15 years trying to adapt and adapt to new digital realities.
There were a lot of people and things that contributed to this event in terms of close extinction: Napster and its offspring, a failure of the imagination of the music industry and, in an improbable way, the National Hockey League.
MP3 technology was the product of a team led by Karlheinz Brandenberg at Fraunhofer Institute in Germany. In 1988, they started working on a way to effectively send the audio to an old copper telephone, a support that was not capable of a lot of bandwidth. But by carefully applying the theories of psychoacoustic – the idea that stronger sounds mask more calm sounds, which makes the most calm and therefore superfluous digital audio files – could be compressed to a tenth of their original size.
The Fraunhofer presented its compression algorithm to international organizations of technical standards under the name of the group of cinematographic experts, layer 3 or “MPEG-3” to make it short.
The German group has not succeeded well. Other codecs could not reduce the files as much, but the mathematics of competing algorithms were less complex, did not require so much computing power (hey, it was the 80s and 90s), and seemed as well as the MPEG-3 in their narrowed state. While defeats accumulated, funding was threatened and Brandenburg and his people were invited to pack it and move to another project.
So an improbable savior appeared. Steve Church managed a company called Telos. He was looking for ways to improve the audio quality of remote emissions. At the time, remote emissions used a telephone line of the distribution location at the studio. This worked, but due to the bandwidth numbers of copper telephone lines, the audio had a boring astonishment. Church has realized that MPEG-3 technology could be the solution.
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Backup. The MPEG-3 algorithm changed right on the right required a lot of tests and errors. The most famous test bench for the Fraunhofer people was Tom’s dinnerA two -minute single in Capella by Suzanne Vega. If they could get a compressed version of a simple and pure vocal performance to ring as well as a full digital file, they knew they would have a winner. What is less known is that they also used other less musical audio in their test and error tests.
The Fraunhofer crew experienced the compression of many different kinds of music, recordings of people who speak quickly and those who have spoken with accents, bird calls, noise of the crowd, jet engines and, curiously, sounds of a hockey game. Bernard Grill, a computer programmer of the team, had determined that the sounds of a hockey game – the crowd, skates by scraping the ice, by making booming and so on – were very difficult to compress with precision and without audible problems. Using the field recordings made in German hockey matches, Grill was able to refine the MPEG-3 algorithm.
This is one of the things that interested the church because its dissemination interests have extended to the equipment used for the NHL game. He had several hundred audio streaming boxes called Zephyrs who were authorized at the NHL. The lockout of 1994-1995 gave it a chance to distribute Zephyrs performing the MPEG-3 compression. On January 20, 1995, the first day of the shortened season, Church had a Zephyr installed for the broadcast team playing the game of a match between the Chicago Blackhawks and the Detroit Red Wings.
The audio quality was incredibly good. It was much higher than the listeners heard using the old way of using telephone lines and it was exponentially cheaper than using satellites. It was not long before Zephyrs was installed in each skating rink in the NHL. The only way for hockey to sound better was to be in the building.
It was the break that the Fraunhofer group was looking for. Supported by this success, an application was written for personal computers. Grill was able to code a MPEG-3 encoder that adapts to a 3.5-inch disk of 1.44 megaoctet. It was the first step to allow everyday consumers to create their own MPEG-3 files. And Intel had just introduced its new, more powerful pentium chips, the treatment power required by a 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 has been shortened to “.MP3”.
At the time, the installation of windows on a PC was a laborious process, requiring exchange in and outside the dozens of 3.5 inch floppies. The solution was to introduce a new reader in the home PC market: the CD-ROM. The installation of Windows on a PC has become as simple as deleting a single disc in the CD-ROM player and let the machine do its thing.
Music fans did not take long, only a CD-ROM was just a CD player and CDs were only data discs containing digital music files. As the hard drives became larger, it was possible to tear a CD to a computer for instant access later. Now that Fraunhofer had made its MP3 encoder available to everyone, more music could be stored on a hard drive. In addition, when it is connected to this new thing called “Internet”, it was an snapshot to transfer songs from one machine to another like any other digital file.
Such trading and transfers were slow at the start – someone missing these old numbering modems? – But as wide -band access spreads from companies and institutions to houses, things have exploded. And with the introduction of Napster on June 1, 1999, everyone entered the act.
If the church had not convinced the NHL to take its chance on this new technology in its Zephyr boxes, it is likely that the Fraunhofer group would have abandoned its project and that another compression algorithm would have become the world standard. And although it was a question of time before someone found a way to exchange online musical files, would that have been so simple?
The biggest competitor of MPEG-3 in the fight of standards was MPEG-2, defended by a company called Musicam. Its technology worked, but in some cases it took up to six hours to tear 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 published the first MP3 readers? And would Apple have plunged into iTunes and iPod?
It is possible that the file trading crisis was launched a little further on the road for the recorded music industry. We might have found in a kind of completely different digital era.
When the washer fell that evening to the Joe Louis Arena, who could have guess that the 4-1 victory of the Wings not only ended the lockout of the players, but also changed the future of music forever?
& Copy 2025 Corus Radio, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.