So, presumably we will all be celebrating the tenth birthday of the MP3 today? No? Well, whatever, it is exactly ten years since the Fraunhofer Institute invented the audio compression codec which remains the most user friendly of online music formats a decade on.
Of course, it could be argued that in its ten year life the MP3 has actually been a major hindrance for the music industry. MP3, after all, made the original P2P networks like Napster possible - and so enabled phenomenal levels of global music piracy of a kind never before witnessed by the then very web unsavvy music business. And as it enters the second decade of its existence, the MP3 continues to present the music industry with something of a challenge.
A recent survey of students at America's University of Rochester, who can use the Napster subscription service for free as part of a deal between the college and the download platform, revealed that very few users who find tracks they like in the Napster library then buy them via the digital music company's pay-to-download service, mainly because tracks bought this way are supplied as WMA files, not MP3. Most students will either buy their tracks from iTunes (which, while not MP3, will play on an iPod), or they go back to their P2P of choice and download an MP3 version from there.
This poses an interesting challenge in the fight against illegal P2P file sharing. While the music industry is keen to admonish P2P users on the grounds that there are plenty of legal download platforms out there, so there is no excuse to take tracks from Kazaa or Grokster, the music fan could turn round and say "well, that might be true, but none of the legal download platforms will sell me an MP3" (actually, some of the independent download services do, but all the major players with the big music libraries use other codecs, more often than not Microsoft's).
Of course the problem is heightened by the whole iPod incompatibility thing. While the iPod will only play Apple's own AAC format or MP3, and while Apple won't let anyone else sell AAC files, iPod users are always going to resist legal platforms other than iTunes, and when iTunes doesn't satisfy their needs they will go the P2P route.
So, what can the music industry do? Well, perhaps start making music available to buy as MP3 in all its un-DRMed glory? Yes it makes it easier for music fans to then share those files with their mates, but most music fans do that anyway. By selling MP3s the download companies would be truly competing with the illegal P2P networks, and could then build numerous other revenue streams around their services to ensure any money lost because customers pass on their music to others is recouped elsewhere. Now, there's an interesting idea.
Either way, it seems the MP3's second decade is likely to be as eventful as its first, though lets hope it's in a positive way.