Everyone else was doing essays on sailing and horses and stuff. Go me.

First off, a little technical history. Right now you're probably thinking to yourself, "Hey, how come we never traded music on the internet before Napster came out?" The reason why is because the typical audio CD holds up to 650 MB (megabytes) of space. Each individual song can be up to 50-60 MB each (Jones). Have fun trying to trade a 50 MB song with a friend over the internet. "Hey Billy, I just got the latest Daft Punk song! It will take you twelve hours to download it, but it's awesome!" People don't want that. People want efficiency. And you know who else wants efficiency?

German technological institute would be the first to create the basis for the MP3, the digital audio file that is now used today (Jones).

The Fraunhofer Institut fur Integrierte Schaltungen (geshundteit!), or the Fraunhofer IIS-A, patented their new audio compression technology in 1989, and it was merged into the Moving Picture Experts Group (or MPEG) in 1992, making their new technical term MPEG-1, Audio Layer 3, but popularly known as MP3 (Jones). MP3s allowed for near CD quality sound but with a much smaller file size. This was done with a

The RIAA wished to place subscription fees for Napster users, or charge a fee per MP3 download (the former, by the way, is actually slated to happen soon). But the fans had already tasted the freedom of music sharing, and although they mostly didn't mind the idea of a small fee per month, they wondered if the RIAA was getting in over their heads. Even the artists themselves had something to say. Thom Yorke, the lead singer for the band Radiohead, was quoted on Napster.com as saying, "The cool thing about Napster is that it . . . encourages enthusiasm for music in a way that the music industry has long forgotten to do."

very sophisticated compression codec (or standard) that I don't really understand. The important part was that the human ear could barely, if at all, discern the MP3 music from the CD music, and that the size was drastically diminished. A three-minute song, which is about 40-50 MB on a CD, could be compressed to be about 3 MB with a 128kbps (kilobits per second) compression rate (Jones), saving plenty of room on a computer for other things, instead of enormous music files.

A third reason is that, in all the downloading and compressing and uncompressing of MP3 files, the quality gets kind of awful. Earlier, I pointed out that MP3s are "near CD quality." This is true, but many people like to make or download MP3s, then burn a CD of them, and then make MP3s from that CD. After a while, the quality gets to be like that of a photocopier. If you make a copy of a copy, it starts to degenerate. I've downloaded many a song with little warbles and odd ticks/noises in the sound at odd intervals. In fact, my Kid A album was littered with them, and one track was almost unbearable. So that would be a good reason for a person to go out and buy the actual album. Maybe the RIAA should use this to their advantage. They could leak albums out, but corrupt the MP3s so that they have imperfections. They are already using copy protection in the CDs themselves.

In 1997, Tomislav Uzelec, a Croatian researcher, created the first program that could play MP3s. It was called AMP. AMP was the starting point for today's Winamp (and MacAmp), which is the most popular form of MP3 desktop player around (Jones). Don't believe me? Check the number of downloads at download.cnet.com. But getting these highly sought after MP3s was another issue altogether. People had to either keep MP3s of their own CD collections, borrow CDs from a friend, or find a website that was gracious enough to upload MP3s to their site. In the first two instances, they had to use a MP3 encoding program (such as MusicMatch or RealJukebox), which can be hassle. But in 1999, one small program changed all that, and its name was Napster.

On November 15, 1999, Wired News (www.wired.com/news/) reported that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) was going to sue Napster, on the ground of piracy. The RIAA spokeswoman at the time, Lydia Pelliccia, said, "We spent many days sampling the Napster community, and found that virtually all file traffic was unauthorized" (qtd. in Sullivan), which makes sense because Napster was a Peer-to-Peer network. Peer-to-Peer means that people downloaded MP3s directly from other users, and not from a central server (Peer-to-Peer and other technical terms can be found at the Napster.com Help portion of their website). That would logically make it harder for people to track what music was being traded to whom.

Some topics in this essay:
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