Reuters:"MP3 No One-Hit Wonder: Record Industry Fumes"
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - "...The hottest thing going on the Internet music scene is MP3. No, not a rock band or a new indie record label; it is a music format that makes it easy to download and play near-CD-quality music on a home computer or Walkman-style portable player.
MP3, short for Motion Picture Experts Group-1 audio layer three, squeezes large audio files into small amounts of disk space. A three-minute song that uses 30 megabytes on a disk drive as a standard ''.wav'' file takes about a tenth of the space when recorded in MP3 and can download in under a minute.
Although it has been around for several years, MP3 has taken off only recently thanks to a confluence of events that include an abundance of free MP3 player software plug-ins, a widening pool of music, both legal and pirated, and the support of a growing number of bands and music labels who see it as yet another way to reach fans.
Just how popular is MP3? Industry sources estimate Internet users have downloaded more than 15 million MP3 software players, which work as add-ons to a Web browser. Lycos (http://www.lycos.com) and partner Fast Search & Transfer recently put up a MP3 database (http://mp3.lycos.com/) that lists 500,000 MP3-formatted songs available for downloading from thousands of Web sites.
MP3.com (http://www.mp3.com), a San Diego-based distributor of free MP3 music, registers about 200,000 visitors a day to its Web site. Diamond Multimedia Systems Inc. in San Jose, California, (http://www.diamondmm.com), has boosted production of its Rio portable electronic MP3 player to more than 10,000 units a week and still cannot keep up with demand.
NOBODY KNEW IT WOULD BE THIS BIG
''I don't think anybody knew it would be this big,'' said Mary Medeiros, a Diamond spokeswoman..."
source: © 02/15/99 (REUTERS) Yahoo! Headline News
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