Don't Worry, Your MP3s Are Safe: A Frank Discussion On The Future Of A Format
When you stream a song on Spotify, it's delivered in an audio format — imagine these formats to be containers as literal as a phonograph record — cheekily named "Ogg Vorbis." YouTube, one of the most popular music streaming "services" in the world by volume, prefers something called AAC, or "Advanced Audio Coding." Radio stations, whenever possible, tend to prefer lossless WAV files. If you've played music from your hard drive as far back as the early aughts or as recently as this morning, you may have clicked play on an MP3. You'll be able to tomorrow, next week or a decade from now, provided your music player of choice still has the electricity to do so.
We've been the source of some confusion on that subject recently. An article published here 11 days ago quoted Bernhard Grill — one of the developers of the MP3 format and also of the AAC format for the German research institution Fraunhofer — saying AAC is technologically superior to the MP3 and also that AAC is one of the most widely used formats for listening today, through its ubiquity within streaming, if nothing else (and there's more). That article's headline oversold Dr. Grill as having characterized the MP3 being dead. It would have been more accurate — and more interesting really — if the writer of that article (the same as this one) wrote that the MP3 may be dying. (That article did say explicitly that people would go on using MP3s, but hey.)
To parse this tipping point (and to explore whether we're even in the midst of one) we called — after he reached out to and a professor of communication studies .
