After years as the unrivalled king of the digital-media world, the venerable MP3 music format is losing ground to rival technologies from Microsoft and Apple.
MP3 is still the overwhelming favourite of file traders, but the once-universal format's popularity has been going quietly but steadily down in personal music collections for the last year. According to researchers at The NPD Group's MusicWatch Digital who track the contents of people's hard drives, the percentage of MP3-formatted songs in digital-music collections has slid steadily in recent months, down to about 72 percent of people's collections from about 82 percent a year ago.
"People are still getting MP3s and putting them on hard drives but are deleting them at a rate faster than they're acquiring them," said Isaac Josephson, a researcher at NPD MusicWatch Digital. "People tend to think that downloads are more disposable than rips, and currently, the lion's share [of MP3s] are downloads."
The slow shift in MP3's role is part of an ongoing change in the digital-music industry, with the focus moving slowly away from the anarchic file-swapping networks and toward money-making stores and services such as Apple's iTunes Music Store.
Indeed, the big winners over the past year have been the two formats backed by Microsoft and Apple, each of which has gained about 5 percent "hard-drive share" in the past year, according to the ongoing study by NPD MusicWatch Digital. The project surveys the hard-drive contents of 40,000 different people to track Internet and software trends.
Researchers say the data does not show that MP3 is losing much of its popularity -- files encoded in the format are just more disposable than rivals. People are still downloading boatloads of MP3 files -- but they are discarding them at an even faster rate, the researchers said.
NPD researchers estimate that there was a net loss of about 742 million MP3 files from US hard drives between August 2003 and July 2004, despite people acquiring billions of songs from file-trading networks and their own CDs. By contrast, Windows Media files showed a net gain of 537 million files on US hard drives, Josephson said.
Some analysts say MP3 is evolving into a different role as a format many people use to sample music or keep temporarily, while the rival formats from Apple and Microsoft are being used for permanent digital-music collections.
A separate study, by Net-monitoring company CacheLogic, early this month showed that MP3 still dominates song trading on file-swapping networks.
The company tracked two major ISP networks for two days last weekend and found that MP3 files made up more than 88 percent of all audio files traded, with just 5 percent in Microsoft's format.
Talkback
The A.C.C. operating systems will never change. However the mp3 tech will change with time. Never forget the boot disc era or the beta video players.