Quote Originally Posted by tocsin
MP3 was not pushed on us by the industry. Not in the slightest. Most of the MP3s you saw floating around years ago were all made with hacked (aka. stolen) derivitives of the Fraunhofer codec. When your online distribution options for supposed "quality" compression were Real Audio, MP3 was great. With a whopping 5k transfer rate on my modem if I was lucky, I could get decent sounding tracks from friends without having to sacrifice quality by going the Real Audio route. MP3 wasn't exactly scaring the crap out of, or even being discussed by, the mainstream industry at the time. It wasn't until they figured out that kids with broadband connections were now trading entire albums around the world in a matter of minutes that the mainstream got interested. They saw that Napster obviously had a marketing scheme in mind. The end result was that the industry was forced to accept MP3. They never wanted it. So, they litigate the hell out of some existing entities while they start up their own similar pay
service. MP3 became big because of techno geeks who continued to expand on ideas to make it more user accessable. That was, and still is an ongoing, revolution. You hadn't seen the music industry get so pissy since the advent of blank tapes. They found a way to deal with that by adding a surcharge to sales of blank tapes. But, in the US at least, that surcharge can't be applied to computer storage media (aka blank CD-Rs) and how do you put a surcharge on a technology that is out of your control? It's why I'm so pro-MP3 or any other compression method that makes delivery of information easy and good for the masses. It's basically our doing. It would make the industry nothing but happy to see MP3 and digital distribution completely disappear. At that point, they hold all the cards again.
Do you buy records or cds at all?