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TechStuff Classic: The History of MP3 Players

Published Aug 11, 2023, 5:57 PM

How did the humble MP3 player get its start? When did the iPod take over as the dominant brand? And what's the MP3 Player business like today?

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

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