Jim Louderback

"Why isn't MP3 dead yet," complained reader Matt Bieschke to me in an e-mail. "I've been waiting a long time for MP3 to die, and it just seems to get more popular."

It's a good question, but it brings up a few more. First, what's wrong with MP3? And then, are there any good alternatives? If so, what's holding them back? Let's take these one at a time.

What's wrong with MP3? This venerable audio compression format works but is certainly showing its age. Most newer formats will compress songs into files barely half the size of an MP3—and produce similar if not better audio.

MP3 is also expensive. Software and device makers must pay a royalty to use the format, and that drives up the cost of players. Some alternative formats—notably Ogg Vorbis—are free to use and incorporate.

MP3 also lacks a copy protection mechanism. This may not be a problem for many users, but it certainly bothers authors and publishers of music and other audio files.

Are there better Alternatives? There are, and they solve the problems. Microsoft's WMA, MPEG-4 AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) used by Apple's iPod and iTunes, and Ogg Vorbis all create much smaller files that sound as good or better than MP3s. Ogg Vorbis is free for all, both on the encoding and the playback side. WMA includes built-in digital rights management (DRM), and Apple has appended its own DRM to AAC—which makes music sellers happy.

Why hasn't MP3 been unseated? Formats, once widely adopted, are very hard to change. MP3 has become a lowest-common-denominator format: A device simply cannot be successful without supporting it. Why? Because so many users have invested so much time in creating and downloading MP3 files, and they'll resist going through gathering and encoding all over again. There's simply too much material in MP3 format floating around for us to change over, even with all the benefits of newer formats.

What's it going to take to change? I've developed a law of technology adoption, which I modestly call Louderback's Law: Unless a new technology includes breakthroughs in at least two different dimensions—without adding hardship along the way—it will not supplant and older, established one.


We moved from LPs to CDs because the changes were so revolutionary on so many fronts: CDs sounded much better. They never skipped. They were mostly indestructible (or so they seemed during those first heady years). They were smaller and easier to store. You could carry them with you. The benefits overwhelmed LPs, but it still took years for the format to supplant albums, because users had to replace or grow tired of their existing collections.

Benefits of that magnitude simply don't exist when you compare MP3 with other formats. Despite the griping from Hollywood, Redmond, and the tech elite, MP3 is with us to stay. Oh, not forever. But at least for the next few years. It's just too entrenched, too easy to use, and it's become a standard.

Unseating a standard is tough. We still use Windows and Intel chips even though arguably better operating systems and CPUs have come and gone. I don't see anything so dramatically better on the horizon that it will change our music format standard.

My prediction: Even in five years—2009—MP3 will still be on top.

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