05 August 2008

The Internet

After a controversy over copyright infringement, the file trading service Napster reemerged as a pay-per-download site. © AP Images

(The following is excerpted from the U.S. Department of State publication, American Popular Music.)

It can be argued that the most profound transformations in popular music have been catalyzed by the Internet. In musical terms, the most influential new medium associated with the Internet is MP3, which allows sound files to be compressed to as little as one-12th of their original size. Let’s assume that you would like to download a four-minute track of music from a Web site featuring original music. In its uncompressed, digitally encoded form, this track would require 40 megabytes of data. With MP3 compression, this file can be squeezed down to only four megabytes, while still retaining the sound quality of a CD.

The introduction of MP3 technology spurred a series of bitter struggles between entertainment corporations and small-scale entrepreneurs, echoing past conflicts between major and indie record labels, though on an even larger scale. In 1997 a firm called MP3.com was founded by Michael Robertson, who started by making 3,000 songs available for free downloading over the Internet. By the year 2000 MP3.com had become by far the most successful music site on the World Wide Web, with over 10 million registered members. As with digital sampling, this new way of disseminating musical materials raised a host of thorny legal problems, centered on the issue of copyright. While MP3 files are not inherently illegal, the practice of digitally reproducing music from a copyrighted compact disc and giving it away for free without the artist’s or record company’s permission arguably is illegal.

[This article is excerpted from American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, published by Oxford University Press, copyright (2003, 2007), and offered in an abridged edition by the Bureau of International Information Programs.]