Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the tech
Speaker 1: are you. It is a Friday. It is time for
Speaker 1: a tech stuff classic episode. And this episode originally published
Speaker 1: on February fifteenth, twenty seventeen, which I believe would make
Speaker 1: it my ten year anniversary at what was then how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works. Yeah, I've worked in the same job since
Speaker 1: two thousand and seven, but it's the company has changed
Speaker 1: a few times. Anyway, this episode is called the History
Speaker 1: of MP three players. Hope you enjoy. First, let me
Speaker 1: just give like kind of a very brief overview of
Speaker 1: the history of the MP three super summarized version. If
Speaker 1: you recall, it originated as a project out of a
Speaker 1: research company called the fraun Hoffer gazelle Schaft Company. A
Speaker 1: team of researchers led by Carl Heinz Brandenberg created the
Speaker 1: MP three format back in nineteen eighty seven. Now, what
Speaker 1: he was doing was trying to build a compression formula
Speaker 1: that would allow for high audio quality that doesn't take
Speaker 1: up as much space as raw audio files do. Those
Speaker 1: are huge, so how do you get them smaller so
Speaker 1: that transmission is easier. He wanted to do this for
Speaker 1: audio transmission across phone lines. Now, the name MP three
Speaker 1: comes to us courtesy of the Motion Picture Experts Group,
Speaker 1: also known as IMPEG. And the reason the three is
Speaker 1: there is because the full name for the format is
Speaker 1: the IMPEG Audio Later three. So Brandenberg's team's research led
Speaker 1: to this audio compression format. Now, fraun Haffer Gazelle Shaft
Speaker 1: apply for a patent in Germany in nineteen eighty nine
Speaker 1: and for a patent in the United States in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety six. And this is a good spot to include
Speaker 1: a bit of information to clear up some ambiguity. An
Speaker 1: MP three player can be a couple of different things.
Speaker 1: One version of an MP three player is just a
Speaker 1: program that you run on your computer and it's meant
Speaker 1: to decode compressed MP three files and then play them
Speaker 1: back so that you can listen to them. Now, the
Speaker 1: other meaning of MP three player is really what I
Speaker 1: was going to talk about today. That's a dedicated, typically
Speaker 1: portable device that is a decoder and an audio system
Speaker 1: all in one, kind of like a Sony Walkman. Was
Speaker 1: the old cassette player. I think of MP three player
Speaker 1: as this handheld personal audio device, but technically MP three
Speaker 1: player can refer to either, and since it can refer
Speaker 1: to either, I'm going to cover the history of both,
Speaker 1: but I'm really going to focus more on those handheld devices.
Speaker 1: Well frownhawfer a gazelle shaft, and I do love saying
Speaker 1: that name over and over, which is why I take
Speaker 1: every opportunity to do so. They marketed an MP three
Speaker 1: player program for computers, but it failed to catch on.
Speaker 1: It wasn't terribly user friendly, people didn't really care for it,
Speaker 1: and the MP three was actually in danger of fading
Speaker 1: into obscurity. If no one had created a user friendly
Speaker 1: MP three program, chances are that format never would have
Speaker 1: caught on and we would have some other compression format
Speaker 1: that would be the standard, or at least a major
Speaker 1: standard in audio compression. Now, there were other researchers and
Speaker 1: companies working on a way to find success where the
Speaker 1: German company found frustration, and that's when we flash forward
Speaker 1: to nineteen ninety seven. So remember nineteen eighty seven is
Speaker 1: when the company first started developing the MP three compression format.
Speaker 1: Ten years later is when Thomas lav Uzilac created the
Speaker 1: AMP MP three playback engine. Now. Uzlak was born in
Speaker 1: Croatia and studied at the University of Zagreb's Faculty of
Speaker 1: Electrical Engineering and Computing, and he had graduated with a
Speaker 1: degree of engineering and he developed his MP three player
Speaker 1: software when he was a student, and he wanted to
Speaker 1: launch it as a commercial product. He said, all right, well,
Speaker 1: I've created this thing that can play MP three files,
Speaker 1: and I want to be able to make this something
Speaker 1: like a piece of software that I could actually sell.
Speaker 1: So he formed a partnership with an American entrepreneur named
Speaker 1: Brian Littman. Together they created a new company called Advanced
Speaker 1: Multimedia Products. This was back in the time when multimedia
Speaker 1: became like the catchphrase. It was a buzz term, kind
Speaker 1: of similar to like the way we call Internet of
Speaker 1: Things or cloud computing. Those are real buzz terms today.
Speaker 1: Multimedia back in those days was the big buzz word,
Speaker 1: and it also could mean things like full motion video
Speaker 1: in computer games, and I've talked about that in a
Speaker 1: previous episode. They were terrible and amazing and terrible. So
Speaker 1: Advance Multimedia Products that's where you get the AMP in
Speaker 1: AMP MP three. It wasn't AMP like an amplifier, but
Speaker 1: rather an acronym for advanced multimedia products. Side note. Uz
Speaker 1: Lack would later go on to work in the world
Speaker 1: of video games. He co created a company called two
Speaker 1: by two Games, which released a turn based war game
Speaker 1: called Unity of Command. So, if you've ever played Unity
Speaker 1: of Command, that was made by the same person who
Speaker 1: created the first commercially successful MP three player program. So
Speaker 1: this program hits the market and it is commercially successful,
Speaker 1: but it's not entirely to use for everybody. That's when
Speaker 1: a University of Utah student named Justin Frankel took this
Speaker 1: AMP program and he poureded it over to the Windows
Speaker 1: operating system along with help from a few other developers,
Speaker 1: and he called this port win AMP WI NAMP. Justin Frankel,
Speaker 1: by the way, would actually go on to develop the
Speaker 1: Newtella peer to peer sharing program, and Nutella in this
Speaker 1: case is spelled with a G in Gnutella. There's some
Speaker 1: disagreement online, by the way, regarding to who contributed to
Speaker 1: creating win AMP and who was ultimately responsible who did
Speaker 1: most of the work. But I'm gonna be honest with you, guys,
Speaker 1: I cannot sort it all out. There are multiple stories
Speaker 1: out there. They all disagree with each other. Some of
Speaker 1: them seemed to be a little more conspiracy oriented than others.
Speaker 1: It's very difficult to sort out what is the actual truth.
Speaker 1: It seems to me like there were multiple players involved
Speaker 1: and there's disagreement about who did most of the work.
Speaker 1: So for the purposes of this podcast, let's say that
Speaker 1: Frankel developed win AMP and just put a little asterisk
Speaker 1: behind that phrase, because honestly, without chatting with all the
Speaker 1: parties involved, I can't really make an educated guess as
Speaker 1: to whom was the ultimate party responsible. I'm guessing it
Speaker 1: was more of a group effort. Now when AMP would
Speaker 1: actually go on to become one of the top MP
Speaker 1: three playback programs on the Windows platform in nineteen ninety eight,
Speaker 1: it was a free program. Anyone could download it, and
Speaker 1: that really helped cement the MP three format. It helped
Speaker 1: establish it as a format that would stick around because
Speaker 1: now you had a free program you could use. You
Speaker 1: had a compression formula that allowed you to store a
Speaker 1: lot more music in the same storage space as if
Speaker 1: you were to use the raw music files. You could
Speaker 1: store way more music with MP three format. Because it
Speaker 1: compressed it so low or solow as in low storage space.
Speaker 1: And of course that depended upon things like the bitrate
Speaker 1: you set your encoding at. And if you wanted to
Speaker 1: learn more about that, you can listen to the Digital
Speaker 1: Audio episode I did to talk more about bitrate. I'm
Speaker 1: not going to go into that here. So the MP
Speaker 1: three format was no longer in danger of fading off
Speaker 1: into obscurity. In nineteen ninety nine, one year after win
Speaker 1: amp became free, AOL purchased the rights to win Amp.
Speaker 1: They actually acquired a company called Nollsoft. That was the
Speaker 1: company that Frankel had formed when he was marketing win Amp.
Speaker 1: And the price for acquiring Nollsoft was a cool eighty
Speaker 1: million dollars, not bad for a University of Utah dropout.
Speaker 1: Frankel dropped out of the out of college once he
Speaker 1: had developed this program because he was running his own company,
Speaker 1: created a startup, and found enormous success by getting acquired
Speaker 1: by AOL. This was just one example of a long
Speaker 1: and storied history of people creating companies that showed some
Speaker 1: utility and then selling out to a larger company. And
Speaker 1: by selling out, they don't mean they sold out in
Speaker 1: the derogatory sense. They made really good business decisions by
Speaker 1: making millions of dollars off of their work. I only
Speaker 1: wish I had come up with something equally as useful
Speaker 1: so that I could be a millionaire. Gosh darn it,
Speaker 1: but don't we all anyway? It was not long for
Speaker 1: this world ultimately, because in twenty thirteen AOL shut down
Speaker 1: win amp. You couldn't download it anymore, they stopped supporting it.
Speaker 1: But of course, by twenty thirteen the MP three format
Speaker 1: was firmly entrenched, so the death of winnamp did not
Speaker 1: mean the death of the MP three And there are
Speaker 1: tons of other MP three player programs and MP three
Speaker 1: compatible programs out there, way more than I can name.
Speaker 1: Some of them have really interesting features. Some of them
Speaker 1: are really slimmed down programs that just have basic commands.
Speaker 1: Most operating systems have some form of MP three playback
Speaker 1: functionality built into them with a stock application, so you
Speaker 1: don't even have to download anything to be able to
Speaker 1: access MP three files for most cases. So instead of
Speaker 1: focusing on the software side, let's shift over to talk
Speaker 1: about portable MP three players. When did they start to
Speaker 1: show up? So, while Uzlak was working on the AMP
Speaker 1: MP three player program, and thank goodness, I'm not going
Speaker 1: to have to say that anymore. There was a company
Speaker 1: in South Korea that was busy creating the first solid
Speaker 1: state handheld MP three player. Now that company was this
Speaker 1: Say Huh Information Systems Corporation. The original product they launched
Speaker 1: was called the MP man Digital Stereo Player, kind of
Speaker 1: like a Walkman, but it's an MP man. And of
Speaker 1: course Walkman came from Sony. This came from Sehan Information Systems. Now,
Speaker 1: the company wasn't prepared to market this worldwide, so they
Speaker 1: actually partnered with another company, Eiger Labs, and Iiger Labs
Speaker 1: was in charge of marketing this product over in the
Speaker 1: Western world, and they showed off the device at the
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety eight c BIT trade show in Germany. The
Speaker 1: product would then hit the consumer market in the summer
Speaker 1: of nineteen ninety eight. So you have the software side
Speaker 1: developing at the same time as the hardware side, which
Speaker 1: was kind of interesting right now. There were two versions
Speaker 1: of the early MP man MP three player. Others would
Speaker 1: follow after a while, but the first two we're pretty simple.
Speaker 1: One of them had thirty two megabytes of memory, which
Speaker 1: was enough to hold about thirty two minutes of audio
Speaker 1: and coded at one hundred and twenty eight kilobits per second.
Speaker 1: That's about eight standard length songs. Obviously, standard length is
Speaker 1: you know, that depends, but we're talking three to four minutes, right. So,
Speaker 1: just for fun, out of the mischievounus of my heart,
Speaker 1: I decided to ask eight co workers a simple question.
Speaker 1: If you could fit one and only one song on
Speaker 1: an MP three player for your use, what would it be?
Speaker 1: And so here is the How Stuff Works employee playlist,
Speaker 1: as determined by the eight coworkers I asked. I asked
Speaker 1: a couple of others this question later on and tortured
Speaker 1: them as well. By the way across the board, when
Speaker 1: I asked this question, it was clear to me that
Speaker 1: the people responding were giving more thought to this question
Speaker 1: than perhaps any other piece of work that crossed their
Speaker 1: desk this week. That's not a judgment, I'm just making
Speaker 1: an observation. So coworker Allison said that she would pit
Speaker 1: under pressure by Queen and David Bowie on this MP
Speaker 1: three player. Christopher went with adore by Prince, although he
Speaker 1: has since reconsidered his choice multiple times. Nathan chose lateralis
Speaker 1: by tool Sherry chose Telephone Call from Istanbul by Tom
Speaker 1: Waits Ramsey, who is the director for the Forward Thinking series.
Speaker 1: Now his choice was Waiting Room by Fugazi. Our office manager,
Speaker 1: Tamika said she would go with the Imperial March by
Speaker 1: John Williams from the Empire Strikes Back soundtrack. I think
Speaker 1: she wins. Julie, who hosts Stuff of Life among other things,
Speaker 1: went with Nina Simone's Cinnerman, specifically a live version. She
Speaker 1: wanted me to make sure I mentioned that. And then
Speaker 1: we have Matt Frederick, one of the hosts of Stuff
Speaker 1: they don't want you to know, who decided to torture
Speaker 1: me because he chose a song that I don't think
Speaker 1: I can pronounce svefen ge Inglar by a group called
Speaker 1: Seegar Ross. And I know I've butchered it, and I
Speaker 1: know that that wasn't necessarily Matt's intent, But I also
Speaker 1: know that Matt is probably not disappointed to hear that
Speaker 1: I cannot say the name of the song he chose. Now,
Speaker 1: I think it's only fair that I do the same
Speaker 1: as my coworkers. But I'm giving myself all eight tracks.
Speaker 1: So here are eight songs I feel like I could
Speaker 1: put on an MP three player that could only hold
Speaker 1: those eight songs. First up is Tie your Mother Down
Speaker 1: by Queen because it's a song that was written in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy six by Brian May, and May went on
Speaker 1: to become an astrophysicist. So if an astrophysicist can write
Speaker 1: an amazing song called tie your Mother Down, I think
Speaker 1: you have to include it on your MP three player. Next,
Speaker 1: I've got Sabotage by the Beastie Boys, which I think
Speaker 1: is best played in a car that has all the
Speaker 1: windows rolled down. Third is my one and only entry
Speaker 1: from They Might Be Giants. This one would be Can't
Speaker 1: Keep Johnny Down, because you know it's my name's Jonathan,
Speaker 1: so I went with that. Anyone who knows me is
Speaker 1: aware that I'm an enormous fan of They Might Be Giants,
Speaker 1: so picking any one song from them was really tough.
Speaker 1: Fourth would be The Clashes cover of Pressure Drop, which
Speaker 1: was originally by Toots and the Maytolls, which is one
Speaker 1: of my favorite cover songs. And then next, I've chosen
Speaker 1: this Must be the Place by the Talking Heads. Then
Speaker 1: we would have a song from a more recent band
Speaker 1: that I've become obsessed with that would be the Struts
Speaker 1: and Put Your Money on Me. After that, sob by
Speaker 1: Nathaniel Raightliff and The Night Sweats, And the last song
Speaker 1: I would put on my MP three player would have
Speaker 1: to be something that would indicate my love of musicals.
Speaker 1: So I picked the song Once in a While from
Speaker 1: The Rocky Horror Show, not the Rocky Horror Picture Show,
Speaker 1: but the play The Rocky Horror Show and specifically the
Speaker 1: roxy cast version. So look up the different songs. I mentioned,
Speaker 1: both the ones that my coworkers picked and the ones
Speaker 1: I picked to kind of get your idea of why
Speaker 1: anyone would want to put that on an MP three
Speaker 1: player that could only hold eight songs. It'll give you
Speaker 1: a lot more information about the personalities of the people
Speaker 1: who work here and of me. I guess that's also
Speaker 1: a warning now. I did say that the MP man
Speaker 1: was available in two versions. The second one actually had
Speaker 1: sixty four megabytes of storage. That's double the amount of
Speaker 1: data you could stuff onto the other version. It did
Speaker 1: not have a rechargeable battery, though the thirty two megabyte
Speaker 1: had a nickel metal hydride battery that you could recharge
Speaker 1: and had nine hours of play time, which is pretty incredible, right,
Speaker 1: like nine hours to play eight songs over and over again. Well,
Speaker 1: the sixty four megabyte instead of having that rechargeable battery,
Speaker 1: it ran off a single double A battery. Now, technically
Speaker 1: the double A could be rechargeable depending upon what brand
Speaker 1: you purchased, but you get what I mean. It wasn't
Speaker 1: inherently a rechargeable battery. The original player, the thirty two
Speaker 1: megabyte version, it didn't have expandable memory. So if you
Speaker 1: wanted to upgrade, you had to do this. You purchase
Speaker 1: your thirty two megabyte, You decide, you know what, eight
Speaker 1: songs isn't enough, I'd really like to have sixteen on there.
Speaker 1: You would send your thirty two megabyte model and a
Speaker 1: check to cover the difference in cost off to Eiger Labs,
Speaker 1: and they would send you a sixty four megabyte version
Speaker 1: in return. That's how you upgraded. Didn't have anything to
Speaker 1: do with removable storage discs or anything like that. So
Speaker 1: how much did these things cost? Well, the thirty two
Speaker 1: megabyte MP man cost a cool two hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: dollars when it launched in nineteen ninety eight. If you
Speaker 1: were to take that same product and look at inflation,
Speaker 1: you could say, all right, well today, that means it
Speaker 1: would cost close to three hundred and sixty eight dollars.
Speaker 1: So you would be spending almost three hundred and seventy
Speaker 1: dollars in order to listen to eight songs on the
Speaker 1: go in digital format. And of course that also depends
Speaker 1: upon the song length. Right, If you wanted to store
Speaker 1: songs by the Ramones on there, you'd probably be able
Speaker 1: to squeeze in an extra tune because most Romote songs
Speaker 1: are three minutes or shorter. But if you're a big
Speaker 1: fan of the musical genius known as Meatloaf, you might
Speaker 1: only get a couple of tracks on your MP three
Speaker 1: player before you filled up all the memory. Now I've
Speaker 1: gotten more to say about the MP man and the
Speaker 1: more successful MP three player that followed it, but first
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. The
Speaker 1: launch of the MP man wasn't an enormous success, but
Speaker 1: it did help establish the MP three as not just
Speaker 1: a digital compression format, but also a file type that
Speaker 1: could be used for portable devices. So in September nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety eight, just a couple of months after the MP
Speaker 1: man launched, a new MP three player emerged, and this
Speaker 1: was the Rio PMP three hundred and that debuted at
Speaker 1: a price of two hundred dollars, which then prompted Eiger
Speaker 1: Labs to reduce the MP man price to two hundred
Speaker 1: dollars as well. The PMP three hundred also had thirty
Speaker 1: two megabytes of storage space, and you'd load music from
Speaker 1: a computer using a parallel port cable. Do you remember.
Speaker 1: Those were kind of the things we would use before
Speaker 1: stuff like USB cables became a standard. So how did
Speaker 1: this PMP three hundred measure up to the mp man
Speaker 1: apart from the identical amount of storage space. Well, if
Speaker 1: you look at an MP man, and I do recommend
Speaker 1: that you search for these different devices and look at
Speaker 1: images just so you can see what these actually looked like.
Speaker 1: The MP man had a very small digital display, almost
Speaker 1: like an electronic calculator, like handheld electronic calculator that you
Speaker 1: would have basic one, not even a scientific model. And
Speaker 1: so it had a very small digital display that mostly
Speaker 1: showed how much time had passed from the launch of
Speaker 1: a song. And it had two physical buttons that you
Speaker 1: could use to navigate the device, one called mode and
Speaker 1: the other called info, and it weighed about sixty five grams.
Speaker 1: The PMP three hundred had a larger digital screen than
Speaker 1: the MP MAN, and it also had more buttons, including
Speaker 1: three on the top edge of the player and several
Speaker 1: more on the front surface of the player beneath where
Speaker 1: the screen was. A circle in the front gave basic
Speaker 1: controls like play, fast, forward, rewind, and stop, and other
Speaker 1: buttons allowed you to do things change the volume level
Speaker 1: or select basic functions like repeat. These would be things
Speaker 1: that become standard in future MP three players. The additional
Speaker 1: features and lower price point pushed the Rio ahead of
Speaker 1: the MP Man. Now that's not to say that the
Speaker 1: launch of the Rio was perfectly smooth. In October nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety eight, the Recording Industry Association of America aka the
Speaker 1: ri double A sued Reo Port, which was a subsidiary
Speaker 1: of a company called Diamond Multimedia. And Diamond multi Media
Speaker 1: essentially produced the Rio through Rio Port. So what was
Speaker 1: the beef? Well, the ri double A claimed that the
Speaker 1: Rio violated the nineteen ninety two US Home Recordings Act.
Speaker 1: The MP Man was such a niche item that the
Speaker 1: RIUBLEA didn't even take notice of it, but the Rio
Speaker 1: was making a bigger splash, and so the ri double
Speaker 1: A said, we've got to nip this in the butt.
Speaker 1: Anyone familiar with media organizations knows that this is a
Speaker 1: pretty common occurrence. So you get a new technology that
Speaker 1: debuts and it allows people to create, play, and share
Speaker 1: recordings of media, and then lawsuits come flying in. We
Speaker 1: saw it with the development of video cassettes, both Beta
Speaker 1: max and VHS. We saw it with just cassette tapes.
Speaker 1: We saw it with CDs and specifically writeable CDs, and
Speaker 1: we saw it with MP three's no big shock. Every
Speaker 1: time that someone comes up with a new way to
Speaker 1: do this, we see the various industry components react normally
Speaker 1: through lawsuits. And on the one hand, you can kind
Speaker 1: of understand where they're coming from. If someone can replicate
Speaker 1: a recording or make it available for other folks to
Speaker 1: download for free, why would anyone bother to pay for
Speaker 1: a recording? Right So, why would I bother to pay
Speaker 1: for a song if I could just go online download
Speaker 1: it for free and you know there's no repercussions there.
Speaker 1: But on the other hand, we've seen multiple times that
Speaker 1: the legal tactics don't prevent piracy from happening, and In
Speaker 1: some cases, lawsuits might encourage people who otherwise wouldn't dream
Speaker 1: of pirrating stuff to actually go to the dark side
Speaker 1: and do it, saying, you know, I wasn't going to
Speaker 1: do it before, but because of the way this company
Speaker 1: is acting, I'm totally going to do it now. Maybe
Speaker 1: they're just justifying what their activity is, but it's not
Speaker 1: a great story, and it also leads to companies adopting
Speaker 1: various types of digital rights management or DRM that can
Speaker 1: ultimately cause more frustration to legal customers than to people
Speaker 1: pirating that software or files. More on that in a
Speaker 1: little bit. So for about a week and a half
Speaker 1: in October nineteen ninety eight, the RIIAA was able to
Speaker 1: secure a sales ban on the Rio, so about ten
Speaker 1: days or so the Rio could not be sold legally
Speaker 1: in the United States, but by October twenty sixth, that
Speaker 1: ban was lifted. Reoport would countersue the RIAA in December
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety eight and said that what that organization was
Speaker 1: doing was illegal. They were trying to stifle a market
Speaker 1: that they didn't actually control, and that market would be
Speaker 1: digital music. There was a lawsuit that followed, and the
Speaker 1: court ruled that the Rio wasn't in violation of any
Speaker 1: rules because the company couldn't control the behavior of its customers.
Speaker 1: In other words, it's not an MP three player manufacturer's
Speaker 1: fault if customers fill up their devices with stolen files.
Speaker 1: They can't control that. It's the same as saying it's
Speaker 1: not a computer manufacturer's fault if a hacker uses their
Speaker 1: computers to make malware. Dell can't control if I take
Speaker 1: a Dell computer and start creating malware off of it,
Speaker 1: So Dell should not be held at fault if I
Speaker 1: unleash a damaging malware onto the world. By the same token,
Speaker 1: an MP three player manufacturer can't guarantee that its customers
Speaker 1: are going to play by the rules, and it can't
Speaker 1: be held responsible when they don't. The Riublea appealed this verdict,
Speaker 1: and then the court said that the Rio didn't qualify
Speaker 1: as a recording device under the definitions the Recording Act,
Speaker 1: so therefore it couldn't be in violation of any rules
Speaker 1: because it didn't qualify for the rules that Riublea said
Speaker 1: were in play. So the MP three player lived to
Speaker 1: fight another day. On a side note, the Riublea would
Speaker 1: soon see its fears realized upon the birth of peer
Speaker 1: to peer sharing services, namely Napster. These services became massive
Speaker 1: resources for pirates, first of music files and then later
Speaker 1: for all types of files. Now, the technology itself im
Speaker 1: peer to peer sharing isn't illegal, but it was put
Speaker 1: to illegal use frequently enough that everyone in the industry
Speaker 1: was equating this perfectly legal means of distribution with illegal
Speaker 1: life activity. It became an enormous headache for a lot
Speaker 1: of people who used peer to peer sharing for totally
Speaker 1: legitimate legal purposes. It didn't help that there were also
Speaker 1: lots of people using it to pirate the crap out
Speaker 1: of music, movies, and games and other types of files.
Speaker 1: This would also extend into the era of the bit
Speaker 1: torrent networks, So I've talked about those in previous episodes.
Speaker 1: I won't dwell on it here. Those lawsuits, however, got
Speaker 1: the attention of the industry at large, and nobody wanted
Speaker 1: to get sued by a powerful organization representing the interests
Speaker 1: of the major music labels. They had almost bottomless amounts
Speaker 1: of cash and could completely bankrupt smaller companies that were
Speaker 1: trying to get into this industry. So various entities in
Speaker 1: the technology sector, including consumer electronics companies and various rights
Speaker 1: holders formed what was called the Secure Digital Music Initiative
Speaker 1: or SDMI. Their goal originally was to create a strategy,
Speaker 1: some encryption specifications, and other strategies to prevent the unlawful
Speaker 1: distribution of MP three recordings, So, in other words, they
Speaker 1: wanted to create a digital rights management strategy. To do this,
Speaker 1: they created a digital water marking process that would attach
Speaker 1: a bit of code to a music file, and that
Speaker 1: bit of code would act as a watermark. If you
Speaker 1: tried to remove the water mark, it would in theory
Speaker 1: cause damage to the MP three file, so that you
Speaker 1: would get signal loss, you would have a lower quality
Speaker 1: sound file, or maybe it wouldn't even play properly at all.
Speaker 1: And they also worked to create a standard for MP
Speaker 1: three players. So the idea was that MP three player
Speaker 1: manufacturers would implement technology, some kind of code hardcoded into
Speaker 1: the device that would prevent an SDMI compliant player from
Speaker 1: playing an SDMI compliant music file if it didn't have
Speaker 1: authorization to do so. So. In other words, think of
Speaker 1: it like a key in a lock. If the key
Speaker 1: was not present on the device, it could not unlock
Speaker 1: a music file that had been illegally loaded onto the device,
Speaker 1: and to make sure that their plan worked, THEDMI group
Speaker 1: invited various hackers to try their hand at removing that
Speaker 1: digital watermark without harming the MP three file. So there
Speaker 1: was a group led by a Princeton University professor of
Speaker 1: computer science and his name was Ed Felton. They claimed
Speaker 1: that they managed the task. Now, the SDMI group said no, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: you didn't do it because just because our software says
Speaker 1: that the watermark is gone doesn't mean the watermark is
Speaker 1: really gone. Plus there's signal loss here in this audio file,
Speaker 1: so you didn't really successfully do this. Now, Felton's group
Speaker 1: did not opt for the non disclosure policy. The group
Speaker 1: had offered a prize, a cash prize award to anyone
Speaker 1: who could manage to do this. If you opt out
Speaker 1: of that non disclosure policy, you were not eligible for
Speaker 1: the award. Well, Felton's group never agreed to the non
Speaker 1: disclosure part, so they moved to publish their method to
Speaker 1: defeat the SDMI DRM strategy, and that's when several groups,
Speaker 1: including the RIAA, sprung into action. They threatened legal action
Speaker 1: under the Digital Management Copyright Act or DMCA. Felton turned
Speaker 1: to the Electronic Frontier Foundation the EFF and said, hey,
Speaker 1: now this is not fair. So they took it to
Speaker 1: the US Department of Justice, and the DOJ said, you're cool, Felton,
Speaker 1: because legit academic research isn't a violation of the DMCA.
Speaker 1: So the paper was published. The SDMI essentially dissolved without
Speaker 1: any fanfare in two thousand and one. Turns out that
Speaker 1: protecting digital information is pretty tricky, and this approach was
Speaker 1: ultimately a failure. It's probably a good thing, seeing as
Speaker 1: how those approaches to dra tend to do more harm.
Speaker 1: They negatively affect legitimate legal customers more than they affect
Speaker 1: the people who are skirting around the law. And trust me,
Speaker 1: nothing is more frustrating than the feeling you're being punished
Speaker 1: for following the rules. Anyone who's played a single player
Speaker 1: video game that will only work if you have an
Speaker 1: active connection to the Internet probably knows what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1: All right, back to the MP three players. After the
Speaker 1: launch of the MP Man and the Rio, other devices
Speaker 1: began to hit the market, and the biggest challenge companies
Speaker 1: faced was to provide a decent amount of memory storage
Speaker 1: while trying to keep the price down because in those
Speaker 1: early days, if you wanted to use solid state flash
Speaker 1: based memory storage, you're paying a pretty hefty price. We're
Speaker 1: talking between three and four dollars per megabyte, which adds
Speaker 1: up to about thirty five hundred dollars per gigabyte. That's
Speaker 1: an enormous amount of money. I don't have thirty five
Speaker 1: hundred dollars to spend on a one gigabyte MP three player.
Speaker 1: I don't have it to spend on a terabyte MP
Speaker 1: three player, to tell you the truth. Now, in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety nine, a new MP three player debuted with a
Speaker 1: much larger hard drive than its competitors. And this was
Speaker 1: the Remote Solutions Personal Jukebox and it had four point
Speaker 1: eight gigabytes of storage. How How could Remote Solutions Personal
Speaker 1: jukebox have four point eight gigabytes when everyone else is
Speaker 1: struggling with thirty two or sixty four megabytes? Did it
Speaker 1: cost the same amount as a car? No? And the
Speaker 1: reason was personal jukebox wasn't using solid state flash memory. Instead,
Speaker 1: the personal jukebox actually was using a repurposed laptop hard drive.
Speaker 1: In other words, it used a disc based storage system,
Speaker 1: hard disk, not floppy disk, and it used magnetic storage
Speaker 1: instead of the solid state model. Now that kept the
Speaker 1: price down, but it was still monstrously expensive. The launch
Speaker 1: price for the Personal juke Box was seven hundred and
Speaker 1: ninety nine dollars, which is about the same as one
Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty one dollars in today's money. And
Speaker 1: you might think that a laptop hard drive would make
Speaker 1: an MP three player larger and heavier than those that
Speaker 1: used flash storage, and you're right. It was not really
Speaker 1: a portable device, at least not in the same way
Speaker 1: that the flash based ones were. In two thousand, another
Speaker 1: disc based hard drive MP three player debuted, and this
Speaker 1: one was the Creative Nomad Jukebox. It cost five hundred
Speaker 1: dollars for six gigabytes of storage, so more storage for
Speaker 1: less money, But like the Personal Jukebox, it was a
Speaker 1: hefty monster. It was too big for a personal listening device.
Speaker 1: It kind of looked like a personal CD player rather
Speaker 1: than an MP three player, much too large to fit
Speaker 1: into a pocket. If you wanted to go lightweight, you
Speaker 1: would have to opt for something else like the I
Speaker 1: two go Ego, which had a microdrive capable of storing
Speaker 1: two gigabytes of music. But there was a hefty price
Speaker 1: tag for the I two go Ego. It cost two
Speaker 1: thousand dollars a two thousand dollars MP three player, and
Speaker 1: that's by two thousand year standards like the year two thousand.
Speaker 1: If you wanted to adjust for inflation, it's more like
Speaker 1: two thousand, seven hundred and eighty seven dollars for a
Speaker 1: two gigabyte MP three player. It's not even made out
Speaker 1: of platinum or anything. Other alternatives were also popping up,
Speaker 1: though most of them had those storage limitations. There was
Speaker 1: the RCA Lira or Lyra if you prefer it's l Yr,
Speaker 1: and that marked RCA's attempt to get into the MP
Speaker 1: three player business. The first model had a thirty two
Speaker 1: megabyte capacity on a CF card, and he also had
Speaker 1: a fairly large monochromatic display and several physical buttons for operation.
Speaker 1: If you wanted to store music on the device, you
Speaker 1: had to use proprietary software to write to the CF reader. Moreover,
Speaker 1: the files you'd store would be converted into an encrypted
Speaker 1: format that would only play on the Lira or Lyra
Speaker 1: or whatever. Now, because it actually used a removable memory card,
Speaker 1: you could upgrade the memory. You just buy a higher
Speaker 1: memory card. Now, the max in those early models was
Speaker 1: five hundred and twelve megabytes, so still way less than
Speaker 1: those hard disk style MP three players, but far more
Speaker 1: storage than the standard models that were on the market,
Speaker 1: and it kept the size of the device relatively small.
Speaker 1: One drawback was that when the Lyra booted up, it
Speaker 1: had to read the full contents stored on the card,
Speaker 1: kind of like how your computer when it's booting up
Speaker 1: and it's trying to load the desktop, it has to
Speaker 1: read all the different things that are associated with the
Speaker 1: desktop before it can fully load. So the only way
Speaker 1: it could present a menu of all the songs stored
Speaker 1: on the device was to go through all the contents first.
Speaker 1: The more you stored on it, the longer that boot
Speaker 1: time lasted. If you had more than half of your
Speaker 1: device full and you had five hundred and twelve megabytes
Speaker 1: of storage, you'd be waiting longer than a minute just
Speaker 1: for the thing to boot up properly. So it wasn't
Speaker 1: the most convenient compared to some other devices. Now, that
Speaker 1: entire line of RCA products would persist and evolve, with
Speaker 1: later models adding more functionality and more storage. Meanwhile, in
Speaker 1: two thousand, Sony joined the game by launching a device
Speaker 1: that sort of looked like a pen. It was called
Speaker 1: the Sony Vio MCP ten Music Clip. And boy, doesn't
Speaker 1: that just roll off the tongue. I love these NB
Speaker 1: three players that all have letter and number designations instead
Speaker 1: of just a quipping name that I can rattle off.
Speaker 1: Sony Io MCP ten music Clip, We'll just call the
Speaker 1: music clip from here on out. It was a sixty
Speaker 1: four megabyte digital music player, so their entry level was
Speaker 1: a little higher than the previous models that had come
Speaker 1: out over the last couple of years. It costs three
Speaker 1: three hundred dollars. And here's another big difference. Unlike the
Speaker 1: other players I've talked about, this wasn't actually an MP
Speaker 1: three player. It didn't play MP three files at all.
Speaker 1: Why because, in a very Sony fashion, it would play
Speaker 1: music files in the A track three format. That's at
Speaker 1: RAC three format. That's a format that was created by
Speaker 1: drum Roll Sony. So you could use included software to
Speaker 1: transcode files from MP three to A track three. But
Speaker 1: the whole process took a really long time. It was
Speaker 1: very clunky, and they paired it with a poorly designed
Speaker 1: program designed to move files from a computer to the player, right,
Speaker 1: you would still download files onto your PC or rip
Speaker 1: music from a CD onto your PC. Then you would
Speaker 1: have to transfer from the PC to your MP three player.
Speaker 1: In this case, you would also have to transcode it
Speaker 1: to a track three if it wasn't already in that format.
Speaker 1: It was a very frustrating experience and a lot of
Speaker 1: customers were upset that it wasn't really an MP three
Speaker 1: player despite the fact that MP three would appear on
Speaker 1: the box because of that transcoding program. I mean, the
Speaker 1: transcoding program was included, so why not say MP three
Speaker 1: on the box. Ultimately, the device did not get a
Speaker 1: lot of traction. It did not do very well in
Speaker 1: the marketplace. Also that same year, in two thousand, Iomega,
Speaker 1: which created ZIP discs, launched an MP three player called
Speaker 1: the Hip Zip and it had a forty megabyte storage
Speaker 1: capacity and used a scaled down version of the magnetic
Speaker 1: disc storage that they used for ZIP discs. But at
Speaker 1: this point the market was starting to get a bit crowded.
Speaker 1: There was some confusion going on in the marketplace. A
Speaker 1: lot of companies were launching MP three players at different
Speaker 1: storage capacities for different prices. And the experience could be
Speaker 1: remarkably different depending upon which device you chose and which
Speaker 1: saw where package came along with it so that you
Speaker 1: can manage your music database and load up your device.
Speaker 1: Keep in mind this is a time where these devices
Speaker 1: didn't have Wi Fi connectivity. You had to physically attach
Speaker 1: them to a computer in order to move music over
Speaker 1: onto them. Customers were starting to get a bit frustrated
Speaker 1: because it was a confusing time, and it turned out
Speaker 1: that having a bigger storage drive wasn't necessarily the killer
Speaker 1: feature because some products were just too frustrating to use.
Speaker 1: It didn't matter that you could store more music on them.
Speaker 1: The process of getting music moved to the device was
Speaker 1: so irritating that a lot of people just didn't like them.
Speaker 1: But in two thousand and one, a product launch that
Speaker 1: changed the game completely. Now, before I talk about that,
Speaker 1: let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Okay,
Speaker 1: I mentioned before the break that we had a groundbreaking
Speaker 1: product launch in two thousand and one. I am, of
Speaker 1: course talking about the Intel Pocket Concert. It's like I
Speaker 1: meant the iPod. But the Intel Pocket Concert did launch
Speaker 1: in two thousand and one, and it was pretty cool.
Speaker 1: It had one hundred and twenty eight megabytes of storage.
Speaker 1: It cost three hundred dollars this amount of storage, and
Speaker 1: that price point was really attractive. It actually met with
Speaker 1: some success in the market, but it didn't last very long,
Speaker 1: not because of problems with the device, not because people
Speaker 1: didn't like it, but because Intel reorganized in two thousand
Speaker 1: and one, and in that reorg they shut down their
Speaker 1: home electronics division, and the Pocket concert fell into the
Speaker 1: home electronics category. So it was a casualty of a reorg.
Speaker 1: It didn't have anything to do with the market acceptance
Speaker 1: of the MP three player. Just think if Intel had
Speaker 1: kept it, maybe the story would be very different. No,
Speaker 1: the one that actually launched in two thousand and one
Speaker 1: that changed everything was the iPod. Now, it didn't change
Speaker 1: everything right away when it first launched, it was too
Speaker 1: limited to do that. Apple was not the powerhouse in
Speaker 1: two thousand and one that it would become just a
Speaker 1: few years later. It was still recovering from a very
Speaker 1: tumultuous period in the company history. It had gone through
Speaker 1: a lot of turbulence in the nineties. Co founder Steve
Speaker 1: Jobs had returned to Apple in nineteen ninety seven after
Speaker 1: essentially being exiled for several years. If you remember, Steve
Speaker 1: Jobs was kind of forced out of Apple, effectively forced.
Speaker 1: He was essentially put to the side until he stepped
Speaker 1: away because he wasn't in charge of anything anymore. Then
Speaker 1: Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy after a series
Speaker 1: of terrible business decisions and strategies, and Jobs came back
Speaker 1: in as an interim CEO until he was starting to
Speaker 1: turn the company around and became the actual CEO, and
Speaker 1: he was working really hard to make the company healthy again.
Speaker 1: And the two thousand and one launch of the iPod
Speaker 1: was one of the first really big moves Apple made
Speaker 1: to assert itself and become a leader in computing and
Speaker 1: electronics markets. So the very first generation of iPods had
Speaker 1: a large led screen. They had the classic scroll wheel.
Speaker 1: You'd put your thumb on the wheel and spin it
Speaker 1: around in order to navigate the various lists of songs.
Speaker 1: A scroll wheel in that first generation was surrounded by
Speaker 1: the control buttons like play and pause and rewine and
Speaker 1: fast forward, and so the device had a pretty simple
Speaker 1: and fairly aesthetic design, kind of clunky compared to today's technology,
Speaker 1: but less clunky than a lot of the competitors that
Speaker 1: were out there. It also had five gigabytes of storage space,
Speaker 1: and it cost four hundred dollars when it launched. Also,
Speaker 1: it was aimed at a niche market because the only
Speaker 1: compatible computer you could use with a first generation iPod
Speaker 1: was a Mac. It wasn't compatible with Windows based PCs
Speaker 1: just Max the original iPods were running. They were rather
Speaker 1: compatible with MAX that were running a brand new software
Speaker 1: package called iTunes. Now, at that time, iTunes was just
Speaker 1: a management software, right. It was meant to help you
Speaker 1: manage your music files, but you had to get the
Speaker 1: music files from somewhere else at that point. Now, because
Speaker 1: of those limitations, the iPod didn't immediately dominate the MP
Speaker 1: three player space. What's more, other companies were starting to
Speaker 1: introduce innovations into devices, and that was in an effort
Speaker 1: to set them apart from all the other competitors out there.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and two, Arcos began to market a
Speaker 1: product called the Jukebox Multimedia. A lot of jukeboxes in here, anyway.
Speaker 1: The Jukebox Multimedia could play audio and video, as the
Speaker 1: name would suggest, and they had two different versions. They
Speaker 1: had a ten gigabyte and a twenty gigabyte version. The
Speaker 1: basic ten gigabyte version went on sale for four hundred dollars,
Speaker 1: so same price as the first generation I've had, but
Speaker 1: this one could show video and it had more storage space.
Speaker 1: Creative Labs would launch an MP three player called the
Speaker 1: Moveo Muvo, which was a small, simple MP three player
Speaker 1: that used a single triple A battery and had a
Speaker 1: battery life of twelve hours, which was pretty impressive, and
Speaker 1: that came in both sixty four megabyte and one hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty eight megabyte options. It was less expensive than
Speaker 1: a lot of the other players, and it was fairly
Speaker 1: popular at the time because people were starting to really
Speaker 1: get into this idea of the MP three. A year later,
Speaker 1: other gadgets started to join the list, including Sony's next
Speaker 1: attempt at getting into the MP three game. It was
Speaker 1: another catchy model, the nw MS seven zero D rolls
Speaker 1: off the tongue. I could just imagine kids writing Desanta, Santa,
Speaker 1: please get me the nw MS seven zero D, and
Speaker 1: then they probably end up with some completely unrelated electronic
Speaker 1: device because the parents couldn't read the word I'm sorry, Santa,
Speaker 1: couldn't read the words properly, and then ended up buying
Speaker 1: I don't know a hair dryer or something. By the way,
Speaker 1: that device looks really weird. You want to look up
Speaker 1: an image of this, So one more dying for those
Speaker 1: of you who want to look up the image the
Speaker 1: NWMS seven zero D because I don't think I can
Speaker 1: really describe it properly, So here here goes. This is
Speaker 1: just a wild attempt, but I don't really think it's
Speaker 1: gonna help you that much. Imagine something that looks like
Speaker 1: an old fashioned electric razor, and then imagine a cylinder
Speaker 1: protruding from either side of one end of that electric razor.
Speaker 1: And then you have that MP three player from Sony.
Speaker 1: And it was actually a pretty small player. So the
Speaker 1: had a weird shape, but it really wasn't that big.
Speaker 1: It could hold two hundred and fifty six megabytes of music,
Speaker 1: plus it had an additional one hundred and twenty eight
Speaker 1: megabytes storage thanks to a memory card. This one launched
Speaker 1: at three hundred dollars and I actually kind of dig
Speaker 1: the design of this one. It used flash based memory,
Speaker 1: and so a lot of people liked this one, specifically
Speaker 1: if they wanted to do exercise. Because flash based memory,
Speaker 1: you don't have to worry about skipping with any physical
Speaker 1: hard drive like a magnetic storage drive. You've actually got
Speaker 1: a physical disc that spins, and if you jostle it around,
Speaker 1: it can cause the device to skip. So those early
Speaker 1: MP three players, a lot of them, the ones that
Speaker 1: had those disk drive based storage systems, they weren't great
Speaker 1: if you wanted to go jogging or do heavy duty
Speaker 1: exercise because they could skip around. These other flash based
Speaker 1: ones didn't have that problem. Creative continued it's push into
Speaker 1: the MP three market by launching a line of MP
Speaker 1: three players called Zen and the Zen line could play
Speaker 1: not just MP three files, but also WMA files, and
Speaker 1: some could also handle wave files and later others as
Speaker 1: what types of files as well. Well. Creative built management
Speaker 1: software called Creative Media Source, which allowed users to synchronize
Speaker 1: devices to music stored on a computer. That meant that,
Speaker 1: you know, if you added more music to your PC
Speaker 1: and then you hooked up your device to the PC,
Speaker 1: it would automatically pull over new songs into your device.
Speaker 1: You didn't have to do it manually. You didn't have
Speaker 1: to go in and say, all right, don't want this one.
Speaker 1: You could do that, but you didn't have to. So
Speaker 1: if you added new music to your computer, it would
Speaker 1: automatically poured it over to your Zen every time you
Speaker 1: would plug it in. And my first MP three player
Speaker 1: was a Creative Zen Touch that actually launched in two
Speaker 1: thousand and four. At the time I chose the Creative
Speaker 1: Zen Touch, I don't think I got it in two
Speaker 1: thousand and four. I think I got it later, so
Speaker 1: I got it for less. It was a later model.
Speaker 1: It was less expensive, but I chose that one because
Speaker 1: I owned a PC. I didn't own a MAC, and
Speaker 1: I could at that time get a version of iTunes
Speaker 1: for the PC. But iTunes for the PC in those
Speaker 1: days did not work very well. It was a kind
Speaker 1: of a monster on Windows. It was not a piece
Speaker 1: of software I particularly cared for. Back in those days.
Speaker 1: It worked much better on a MAC than it would
Speaker 1: on a PC, and as a result, I felt discouraged
Speaker 1: from using iTunes and decided to go with the Creative
Speaker 1: Zen Touch and use their media source software instead. Now,
Speaker 1: the Zen Touch was a pretty solid brick of a device,
Speaker 1: but I like the interface. It had a touch sensitive
Speaker 1: vertical bar instead of a scroll wheel, and you'd use
Speaker 1: the vertical bar to scroll through your music selection. I
Speaker 1: held onto that thing for longer than I probably should have,
Speaker 1: just because I maintained that it was better to have
Speaker 1: a dedicated device to play music than to use my
Speaker 1: phone to play music. If you guys are longtime listeners
Speaker 1: of Tech Stuff, and you listened way back in the
Speaker 1: day when Chris Poullette was co host of tech Stuff,
Speaker 1: you heard me talk about this, how I preferred having
Speaker 1: a dedicated device for my music so I didn't have
Speaker 1: to gum up the memory on my phone to hold
Speaker 1: all my music collection. And these days I do what
Speaker 1: the majority of people out there are doing. I use
Speaker 1: streaming services to access music. I have some stuff downloaded
Speaker 1: to my phone, but mostly I'm streaming it. So now
Speaker 1: I don't have a dedicated music player, all right. But
Speaker 1: jumping back to two thousand and three, Apple would continue
Speaker 1: with its iPod line. It launched a fifteen gigabyte iPod
Speaker 1: and then later on in two thousand and three, it
Speaker 1: launched a forty gigabyte iPod. But the biggest news was
Speaker 1: that iTunes graduated from a music management software program to
Speaker 1: a full fledged music store interface. That meant that in
Speaker 1: two thousand and three, you could purchase music through Apple
Speaker 1: and then transfer it to your handy dandy iPod just directly.
Speaker 1: This was brilliant, you know, having your ability to shop,
Speaker 1: your ability to manage your playlist, and your ability to
Speaker 1: sync it with your device all in one software package. However,
Speaker 1: Apple was also implementing a digital Rights management strategy DRM
Speaker 1: that really irritated consumers. The forty gigabyte third generation iPod
Speaker 1: is the one that I always think about when I
Speaker 1: imagine an iPod. That's the vision I have in my head.
Speaker 1: They changed the control slightly so they still had the
Speaker 1: LED screen at the top. Beneath that, they put the
Speaker 1: control buttons arranged in a horizontal line below the LED screen,
Speaker 1: so they were no longer around the circumference of the
Speaker 1: scroll wheel, and below the control buttons was the scroll clickwheel.
Speaker 1: This one launched at a four hundred dollars price point.
Speaker 1: We're going to take another break, but we'll be back
Speaker 1: to talk more about the history of MP three players
Speaker 1: in just a moment. By two thousand and four, color
Speaker 1: screens started to become a feature in some of the
Speaker 1: high end m P three p Creative launched the Zen
Speaker 1: Media Center. That one had a color screen and ran
Speaker 1: on the Windows Mobile operating system. It could store forty
Speaker 1: gigabytes music. It cost five hundred dollars. Meanwhile, Iriver's h
Speaker 1: three hundred series packed a color screen and a much
Speaker 1: smaller form factor, and it also included an FM radio,
Speaker 1: so you could buy a twenty gigabyte ie River three
Speaker 1: hundred for two hundred and fifty dollars. Apple followed suit
Speaker 1: by launching an iPod with a color screen and a
Speaker 1: sixty gigabyte storage capacity, costing three hundred and forty nine dollars.
Speaker 1: So now you've got lots of different players trying to
Speaker 1: get the edge by adding in these other features. But
Speaker 1: it was that music store that really gave Apple the edge.
Speaker 1: By pairing a store system with the management software for
Speaker 1: an iPod, Apple created a new way for consumers to
Speaker 1: buy music, and since Apple got a cut of the sales,
Speaker 1: it became an immensely profitable strategy for the company. It
Speaker 1: really propelled Apple into new heights, and Apple was also
Speaker 1: making a name for the quality of its products. People
Speaker 1: really liked the quality, They liked the experience, particularly if
Speaker 1: they owned a Mac. If you were like me and
Speaker 1: you owned a PC, you were still complaining about the
Speaker 1: fact that iTunes was not great on Windows. People began
Speaker 1: to trust the Apple brand more and the iPod would
Speaker 1: start to make its mark in other ways as well.
Speaker 1: Because the popular term for what I do is called podcasting.
Speaker 1: That was a lot to the brand name iPod. Now
Speaker 1: some folks prefer to use less branded terms like netcasts,
Speaker 1: and there's nothing wrong in that, but I would argue
Speaker 1: podcasts remains the popular generic term for what I do,
Speaker 1: and that's thanks to Apple for making the iPod and
Speaker 1: taking MP three player's mainstream. Now, Apple did that not
Speaker 1: just by concentrating on the iPod line, but also by
Speaker 1: launching other brands that catered to specific markets. So you
Speaker 1: had the iPod Shuffle for example. This was a simplified,
Speaker 1: stripped down MP three player. It had no display, It
Speaker 1: automatically would shuffle playlists. I had basic controls that allowed
Speaker 1: you to skip or replay songs and adjust the volume,
Speaker 1: and that simplification meant that the Shuffle could be sold
Speaker 1: for much less money than other MP three players, and
Speaker 1: the standard one gigabyte model was priced at one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty dollars In two thousand and five. Other companies
Speaker 1: were still trying to get into the game. Dell launched
Speaker 1: the DJ Diddy in two thousand and five, which had
Speaker 1: a small display, had an FM radio in five hundred
Speaker 1: and twelve megabytes of storage space, so it was lagging
Speaker 1: behind a lot of the other players, and by then
Speaker 1: iPod was beginning to define the market and newcomers were
Speaker 1: having a harder time gaining any traction. So by two
Speaker 1: thousand and six, Dell would abandon the Diddy Diddy Dum
Speaker 1: Diddy Doo. In two thousand and six, Microsoft tried to
Speaker 1: challenge Apple for that heavyweight championship in MP three players
Speaker 1: and they launched the Zoon. Do you guys remember the Zoon?
Speaker 1: Do you guys remember what they called sharing on the Zoon?
Speaker 1: Like if you had a song and someone else had
Speaker 1: a Zoon and you could share one Zoom song to
Speaker 1: another Zoom. Do you remember Dylan Dylan shaking his head.
Speaker 1: It was called squirting. If you wanted to squirt your song,
Speaker 1: Dylan is a Let's say that there's some disbelief in
Speaker 1: Dylan's reaction, but no, that is in fact what they
Speaker 1: called it. It was a method of being able to
Speaker 1: say that I bought a song, I could share it
Speaker 1: temporarily with you, Dylan, if you had your Zoom, just
Speaker 1: by squirting it right over to you. I just squirt
Speaker 1: that song and then you'd be able to enjoy the
Speaker 1: squirted song on your Zoom. Dylan's giv me a thumbs up,
Speaker 1: and he's, well, there's at least one finger pointing toward me. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So a lot of people made fun of that, and
Speaker 1: obviously I'm still doing it today, despite the fact that
Speaker 1: the Zoon is no longer a thing. Spoiler alert, But
Speaker 1: you know, the Zoon was an impressive attempt to challenge
Speaker 1: the iPod in many ways. It just it came a
Speaker 1: little too late for it to really have a chance.
Speaker 1: It had a color LCD display, and that display was gorgeous.
Speaker 1: I would argue that the original Zoon when it came out,
Speaker 1: its display was better than what Apple's iPod line had
Speaker 1: at that time. It also had an FM radio and
Speaker 1: thirty gigabytes of storage with the first model, and like
Speaker 1: I said, subsequent models would have these other features. Microsoft
Speaker 1: would pair this with a subscription based service through the
Speaker 1: Zoon stores. The Zoom store was kind of like the
Speaker 1: iTunes store, but they had a different strategy. They said,
Speaker 1: here's what we want you to do. You'll pay a
Speaker 1: subscription fee of fifteen dollars a month, and for fifteen
Speaker 1: dollars a month you get all the music you can download. Now,
Speaker 1: that actually sounds fairly reasonable. Today, a lot of streaming
Speaker 1: music services depend upon a subscription base. Right, you might
Speaker 1: not pay the subscription base, but then you're getting lots
Speaker 1: of ads instead of just an ad free experience. But
Speaker 1: then if you opt in to a subscription service, then
Speaker 1: you don't have ads. Well, imagine this. Imagine that you
Speaker 1: pay fifteen dollars a month, but you can download as
Speaker 1: much music as you like, putting aside things like data
Speaker 1: caps which obviously and broadband speeds, which obviously makes an
Speaker 1: impact on how much you can take advantage of this.
Speaker 1: This is the sort of thing I would jump on
Speaker 1: in a second today because you wouldn't just have access
Speaker 1: to music, you would actually get to download those tracks,
Speaker 1: which means if the service ever were to go belly up,
Speaker 1: you could still listen to your favorite tunes. Right Like,
Speaker 1: if the service goes away and the service was how
Speaker 1: you were listening to music, you have to find a
Speaker 1: different service that may or may not have access to
Speaker 1: the same labels that you were used to. This would
Speaker 1: be a way for you to actually hold on to
Speaker 1: those music files and be able to listen to them
Speaker 1: even if the infrastructure went away. But the whole idea
Speaker 1: came a little bit too early, I think, and Microsoft's
Speaker 1: attempts to market the Zoom never really captured a large
Speaker 1: section of the market. In two thousand and seven, Apple
Speaker 1: introduced two products that changed the game again. First was
Speaker 1: the iPod Touch, which moved nearly all the controls for
Speaker 1: the device onto a touchscreen interface, which meant that most
Speaker 1: of the face of the gadget was a screen and
Speaker 1: it allowed for really impressive video playback capabilities. The base
Speaker 1: model was sixteen gigabytes and it cost about four hundred dollars.
Speaker 1: But they also introduced another product that really disrupted things,
Speaker 1: and that was the first iPhone that came out in
Speaker 1: two thousand and seven, and Steve Jobs when he introduced it,
Speaker 1: talked about the fact that it was a computer, a phone,
Speaker 1: and an MP three player all in one, had the
Speaker 1: capability of acting as an MP three player, and it
Speaker 1: really spelled doom for a lot of standalone MP three devices.
Speaker 1: The smartphones became more popular and started to have larger
Speaker 1: amounts of storage, and the price wasn't ridiculously expensive or
Speaker 1: was sometimes supplemented depending upon what service provider you were using.
Speaker 1: In where you've lived, people started seeing fewer reasons to
Speaker 1: purchase a dedicated MP three player, and the company that
Speaker 1: had dominated the market stood poised to kill that market.
Speaker 1: But that market didn't totally die. There are still plenty
Speaker 1: of dedicated MP three players out there, and there are
Speaker 1: a lot of reasons to buy one. You might want
Speaker 1: to pair an MP three player with your car, for example,
Speaker 1: and just have it be like an enormous mixtape for
Speaker 1: road trips, and that way you don't have to wear
Speaker 1: down your phone's battery. Or you might want a simple
Speaker 1: MP three player that you can wear while you're exercising,
Speaker 1: which removes the need to carry a bulky and expensive
Speaker 1: smartphone as you jog or hit the gym. But a
Speaker 1: lot of people are moving away from those dedicated devices
Speaker 1: and relying more heavily on their multipurpose smartphones, so they
Speaker 1: act as a phone, a computer, an MB three player,
Speaker 1: among other things. Now, the MP three player's history has
Speaker 1: a few more stories. I didn't mean to just end
Speaker 1: with the iPod Touch. That same year, Samsung launched the
Speaker 1: yp h P two MP three player, Yet another fantastic name,
Speaker 1: but this was a really pretty device. It had a
Speaker 1: touch screen interface, came out the same year as the
Speaker 1: iPod Touch. A lot of people at the time thought
Speaker 1: it was a superior device to the iPod Touch. Not everybody,
Speaker 1: but a lot of people did. It had Bluetooth capabilities,
Speaker 1: which meant that you could pair it with a phone
Speaker 1: and you could even use it to answer calls that
Speaker 1: were coming in from the paired phone. We also saw
Speaker 1: in two thousand and seven a smaller Zoon and a
Speaker 1: third generation iPod Nano. Didn't really talk about the introduction
Speaker 1: of the Nano, but the Nano was yet another very
Speaker 1: small iPod or MP three player meant for easy on
Speaker 1: the go use, and the iPod Nano that came out
Speaker 1: in the third generation also had a color video screen,
Speaker 1: so you could watch really tiny video on your Nano
Speaker 1: if you wanted to. For some reason. In two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight, we saw the sand Disk sansa fuse debut,
Speaker 1: also the Sony E series Walkman. These were both devices
Speaker 1: that went a totally different route. They were aiming at
Speaker 1: the budget market for folks who were unwilling or unable
Speaker 1: to shell out the big bucks for something like an
Speaker 1: iPod Touch or even an iPod Classic, which was still
Speaker 1: around at that point. These cost about seventy five dollars,
Speaker 1: much less expensive than these counterparts. On the other end
Speaker 1: of the spectrum were the iPod and Zoom models that
Speaker 1: included Wi Fi connectivity, which turned them into something approaching
Speaker 1: a smartphone, but without the cellular connectivity. This is kind
Speaker 1: of how it went for the following years until I
Speaker 1: think something else I should mention in the history of
Speaker 1: MP three players, and that's the year twenty fourteen. That
Speaker 1: was the year that Apple quietly killed off the iPod Classic.
Speaker 1: The iPod Classic lasted thirteen years two thousand and one
Speaker 1: to twenty fourteen, but in twenty fourteen you could not
Speaker 1: any longer buy the standalone MP three player with that
Speaker 1: classic form from Apple. And as I said, there's still
Speaker 1: MP three players out there. If you go to any
Speaker 1: store or you go on Amazon or anything like that
Speaker 1: and you do a search for it, you'll find tons
Speaker 1: of them, but they are a much smaller niche market,
Speaker 1: and they're generally aimed at things like the exercise crowd
Speaker 1: or stuff along those lines, as opposed to people who
Speaker 1: are more used to using their devices just to stream
Speaker 1: music online. All right, that wraps up this classic episode
Speaker 1: of the history of MP three players. If you missed it,
Speaker 1: you should look back in the tech stuff archives for
Speaker 1: this year, because earlier this year I did an episode
Speaker 1: dedicated to Microsoft Zoom and how that particular MP three
Speaker 1: player ended up being a big miss for Microsoft, of
Speaker 1: one of a few notable misses as Microsoft was trying
Speaker 1: to compete directly with Apple. It's a fascinating story all
Speaker 1: on its own, right, So you can check that one
Speaker 1: out if you look through the tech stuff archives from
Speaker 1: this year. In the meantime, I hope you are all
Speaker 1: well and I will talk to you again really soon.
Speaker 1: Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
Speaker 1: visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
Speaker 1: to your favorite shows.