As you all know mp3 music players are now ubiquitious and nearly everywhere and many of have owned several of them.
Before the iPod was released, there were other mp3 players, but none really caught the imagination of the general public. But, and here’s a key point, it WAS the time of dialup modems to connect to the Internet and Napster.
As Dr. Felten showed, Napster was very, very popular, but it only took off when it did because the mp3 format had already been invented. Let me explain.
You have probably heard this song by the Eurythmics:
On my CD of this song, the original AAC format version of this song is nearly 40 Mb. When I compress it down to the Internet MP3 standard 128K compressed format, it goes down to less than 4 Mb.
So, I ask you, if you were on a fast 56K dialup modem, how long would it have taken to download this song if NOT in mp3 format? Would people have had the patience to make Napster the hit that it was?
Similarly, when the first iPod was released, it held a whopping 5 G of data. Or as Steve Jobs put it when announcing it, it lets you put a thousand songs in your pocket. If there had not been the mp3 format, would anybody have paid $400.00 to put roughly 8 uncompressed songs in their pocket?