Court cases, diminished sound quality, piracy problems - but the MP3 is still looking good, writes Brian Boyd
Interoperability. An unlikely sounding buzzword, but it is all people are talking about in the MP3 world. The thousands of new MP3 holders around the country now have serious "interoperability issues", meaning that it's just dawned on them that owning one type of MP3 player, the Apple iPod in this case, means they cannot download tunes from Wippit, Napster or any of the many other online music shops that support the Windows Media Audio format.
Similarly, owners of non-iPod MP3 players will not be able to buy songs from the Apple iTunes online store (newly opened last week for Irish music consumers).
People who thought the mere possession of an MP3 player granted them "access all areas" to the digital music world now find that their choice of online music shop is restricted, depending on which brand they buy and which online shop that brand is linked with. The legal writs are flying already: a consumer in the US, Thomas Slattery, is suing Apple, claiming that the corporation is breaking anti-competition laws by refusing to let other MP3 players use its iTunes music shop.
"Apple has turned an open and interactive standard into an artifice that prevents consumers from using the MP3 player of their choice," says the lawsuit.
This is the latest attack on the ubiquitous and much-hyped Apple iPod. More than six million iPods have now been sold and Apple has 87 per cent of the MP3 market.
Its iTunes shop has now sold more than 200 million songs since its debut on the Internet two years ago.
Thomas Slattery's problem is a classic "interoperability" one. Slattery says he was a happy customer of the iTunes music shop, but now finds himself "forced" into buying an iPod if he wants to listen to the music he has purchased. Apple have declined to comment on the case. Informed sources say the case will be laughed out of court, adding that everyone knows that songs bought on iTunes can only be played on an iPod. But is that really the case? At an even more basic level, a certain generation of music consumer is still struggling to understand what an MP3 player actually is, and whether it has, as is giddily claimed, really revolutionised the music world.
MP3, or Mpeg-1 layer 3, is a piece of software that allows you to play near-CD-quality sound files (i.e. music) taken from the Web. It's a digital music format which allows CD tracks to be reduced to around one-tenth of their normal size. It's popular because you can get hundreds of songs on to a single CD using the MP3 format. MP3 songs can be played on a computer but are more frequently transferred to portable MP3 players where users have access to hundreds, if not thousands, of songs. You cannot, as yet, walk into a music shop and ask for an MP3 album. But you can buy the traditional CD album and then transfer it, via your computer, into the MP3 format. On a very simplistic level, it's like a Walkman, only much smaller and able to hold a lot more songs.
The reason it's such a small and portable format is that the MP3 version strips out a lot of the information recorded in a song that our ears aren't able to hear. The reason it is controversial is that is remarkably easy to share MP3 songs with other people. This is the equivalent of the old "home taping". The MP3 format means you can make illegal "pirate" copies of your music available to anyone else on the Internet - which is in breach of copyright law. While there are plenty of legal MP3 music shops out there (such as iTunes), there are still a number of illegal sites where you can find new music and download it for free, using the MP3 format. The music industry is having some success in closing down these illegal sites and nudging people towards the legal sites.
However, the success of the MP3 format is also due to the fashionable image of the actual, tangible MP3 player. Over the last two years, the iPod has achieved iconic "must have" status, particularly for younger music consumers. This is despite the fact that many claim the iPod is nowhere near the best MP3 player on the market. Other players, such as the Archos and the Zen Micro, are popular, but don't yet have the "style accessory" cache of the iPod. The argument runs that music is somehow cooler when it's played on an iPod.
This week, Apple upped the stakes considerably with the unveiling, in the US, of the iPod Shuffle, the first "budget" MP3 player, which retails at $100 and is expected to be launched on this side of the Atlantic shortly.
The Shuffle is a screenless, palm-sized white unit which only stores between 100 and 250 songs, but it has provoked frenzied buying over the last few days in the US. Designed to be worn like an over-sized key-ring, the Shuffle will no doubt mop up more and more recruits to the MP3 cause.
The Shuffle is so named because it plays the songs it has stored on a "random" basis, but with the flick of a switch users can choose to listen to their music in order. The Shuffle is so small - "smaller and lighter than a pack of chewing gum", according to the company - that it comes with a warning attached: "Do not eat the iPod Shuffle."
But as more and more people purchase MP3 players, problems are arising - and not just over the lack of "interoperability". Previously if you were buying a piece of equipment to play music on, you would have looked at the quality of the sound reproduction and so on; but MP3 users now seem to favour quantity (how many hundreds of songs can be stored) over quality. Because the MP3 format compresses the sound so that the musical files can be as small as they are, there is a loss of sound quality. Significantly, the advertisements for MP3 players never mention sound quality, they usually just emphasise how many different colours the player is available in.
MP3 users, though, see this loss of quality as a tolerable trade-off for being able to have their entire CD collection transferred to something that fits in the palm of their hand. Tellingly, the differences between cheap and expensive MP3 players have nothing to do with sound quality, but only to do with how many hundreds of songs the different players can hold.
Despite "interoperability" issues, questions about its sound quality and ongoing piracy problems, the MP3 market is still growing, and the marketing of the players stresses how "cool" they are in appearance. Apple has now followed up the iPod with the iPod Mini. Although the Mini was savaged by the American press when it first came out, at least by those journalists who hadn't been "entertained" by the Apple corporation - "overly expensive" and "a fit of delusion" being among the kinder remarks - and although, for $50 more, you could buy the full-size iPod, which holds four times as many songs as the Mini, sales of the Mini broke all consumer records for MP3 players.
But then, it does come in "a choice of five brushed-aluminium colours".