1998: Will MP3 Make PHYSICAL MEDIA Obsolete? | Inside Tracks | Retro Tech | BBC Archive 

And now its being used for tyranny and exploitation as the fourth industrial revolution is ushered in and our collective humanity is being eradicated through the transhumanist agenda.

You're absolutely spot on! I always thought that the Internet took the industry by storm and the big record labels didn't have time to react,so their only real course of action was those ridiculous lawsuits. But no, it was clear as day - years in advance - that this was always going to happen. This very report talks about how sales of physical media were leveling off. How did the bean counters running these companies not see that, when sales are all they ever care about?! Absolutely insane.

The majors were warned about the internet and the MP3 revolution in 1996 but they ignored it.

@@willnicholson18 Wanna cuddle? 😙😜

Idiot how many years you skipped I was never able to download movie in few minutes in old era . PC was to slow Internet was to slow . It took few minutes just to find and start download movie .

@RaniaIsAwesome Because suing your customers for choosing to not meet their needs, and them sorting it out by themselves, accomplishes nothing except making customers even more annoyed you're wasting time on suing them instead of meeting their needs. And suing customers is like standing outside your house during an ant invasion and stepping on one out of every thousand ants.

Wait till people to buy vinyl and cassettes figure out you can artificially add vinyl and cassette noise digitally

​@@skip485eeeehhhhh, we're kinda in it doe the physical media itself and not the grain... i mean come on you know google play stopped selling music in favor of youtube music... also hard drives can fail

​@@skip485...also half the stuff on vinyl, cassette, and cds aren't on streaming

Not the websites tho. Aged like milk.

I draw your attention to the line "it'll never scratch" 😋

and that was in the 90's when 15.99 was more like 29.99 covering inflation.

Try £70 for a SNES game that you could finish after 5-6 hours. There was a reason most of my games, videos, and CDs/cassettes were second hand back then.

He couldn't look at the camera - good taste was fighting his job description.

haha I said that, the face does not match the words, he was embarrassed saying it.

With a 56k modem, downloading a typical mp3 file took about 6-8 minutes :P

@@kinromok Not for me, i hope you are from that era and you actually used those modems, because the reality was different than on paper. Probably you used a higher speed modem like 700+ DSL, but those were rare at that time. Besides, never take everything so literal, i was exaggerating.

If you had a 56k modem and your MP3 was compressed to 64kbit then it would take just over 1 sec to download 1 sec of audio. In fact, you could easily stream 32kbit audio in theory.

@@DarkLight748 The rough/marketed speeds always have to be divided for 7 to get the real world speeds. 56 kbps/7 was 8 kbps real world transfer rate, hell...once i got 10 kbps and i felt like i was in the future :D. Have a nice week.

Good way of putting nostalgia in general , especially about technology: “My heart misses those days ❤️, but my brain sure doesn’t 🧠.”

Speaking this was the beginning of the end for physical music. Its like being in a warzone and watching your buddy get blown away by a tank round

Probably 1 MB, not 1 mb.

Good spot, thanks! It also should have been 27th September. The month was right...

And will the Spice Girls still be really cool 😂

It won’t and it shouldn’t either, because nowadays you can download/get your music in even higher quality than CD (FLAC, WAV, AIFF). But streaming is not the way to go though. Especially the way that artists don’t get compensated fairly.

@@ThizOne exactly mate, just meant that’s been the latest question that’s handed around nowadays.

No because you are streaming the MP3z

Yes, because MP3 or any digital audio files are there for good (unless they have DRM built in), and therefore don't require an active internet connection at all times and aren't subject to any data limits.

Ripping a digital source like a CD doesn't make it a lossless recording. Digital music is compromised whatever you do to it.

So what? Then your music collection is defined by preferring 44.1 KHz/16 bit from a physical medium? Wireless streaming is a poor comparison - that will be deliberately low quality to dissuade people from recording a perfect digital copy of it. It shouldn't matter the outright source quality of the music, the music should be first. Sincerely, an 80's child

@@aeiouxs That is true. A badly mixed and mastered record with poor performances will always suck.

You're not listening to a "superior sound compared to wireless streaming". you can listen to high resolution/quality wavs and flac files on streaming sites like tidal n apple music. That aside, the average person can barely tell the different between lossless and 320kbs (High quality MP3) anyway. Which is lower quality than ogg. Ogg and aac is better than MP3. I can buy a wav file of many songs on band camp or Apple, quicker than u can run to hmv or have delivered. People do still buy digital music, mainly other musicians and DJs. But let's be honest, who wants all those files taking up space in your storage for the rest of your life? When u can rent/subscribe to billions of songs under 1 service. Flac is more impressive than wav. Mainly cos it retains basically the same quality yet, It's smaller. Sample rates only matters to audiophiles, most people listen to music on phones, not monitors, so sample rate makes little difference. U may own it but you're also responsible for storing it and for replacing it when it gets damaged. Enjoy your 16 bit rate, CDs. Sincerely, a mid 1666 child.

@@kahyui2486 "Sincerely, a mid 1666 child." Congratulations on reaching your 356th birthday.

As far back as I remember, and I was there when NApster started, it was 128kbps which has always been the norm, even in 2001 Napster days 96 kbps was considered sub par but doable. 192kbps was considered pretty good.

Yeah, I remember the claims back then that 128kbps was 'near' CD quality. 😀 Still, it sounded better than The Top 40 recorded onto battered cassette tapes.

@@lincolnshirepoacher8651 Nah, near-CD was 160 kbps AAC, according to Steve Jobs ;) And I think that for most people it was: no hiss, no wobble, no clicks and pops.

@@TinLeadHammer Yeah, but he was someone who thought that one button on a mouse was plenty. 🙃

At one point software companies and some music publishers advocated for making backups of your purchase, they would often print on the original disk/disc "Back me up and then put me me somewhere safe". Crazy how all that changed.

Ironically the Fraunhofer Society (then known as an institute) that created the MP3 format warned the major record companies that it could do horrific damage to them if they didn't embrace it early and start to monetise it. They failed to embrace it.

Have u ever thought about buying the song digitally? U don't need physical to own it. Just avoid streaming sites buy direct from band camp, Amazon, itunes, beatport etc...

For the most part, that rarely happens. And besides it'll cost you more in the long run to buy everything. Why not just buy what isn't on streaming or buy it when it's removed from streaming?

RU-vid is MP3/4 if you are watching songs or listening to videos on RU-vid.

What happened?

@@BadgerBotherer1 Drugs ... and bondage.

@@puddleglum3306 superglue poisoning?

I loved his early Radio 1 stuff. I thought he'd be the next Kenny Everett, but it wasn't to be.

@@nkt1 He was great on his own show. Then the BBC made Zoe Ball I think it was join him. And that totally killed his humour and the feel of the show. The BBC did the exact same thing with Simon Mayo drive time more recently putting Jo Whiley on with him, ruining the show and it's ratings.

Yeah but no ones actually listening to them. People are buying records to have has interior decor in their ikea shelves so they can post about them in Instagram.

@@Jayfive276 granted some people do do that, but I actually like to listen to my records. I know that’s probably a “boomer” thing to do, or whatever new-fangled term the kids have made up, but not everyone sees a vinyl record and thinks “ooh interior design!” 😂 (For clarity, I am being sarcastic, but I do like my vinyl. I’m 24 so not quite a boomer and I just appreciate music in different formats, including digital)

@@1UPWonders i'm 43 and im NOT a boomer. you kids need to google more

@@BOZ_11 I didn't say you were a boomer, nor did I specify an age range as to who is a boomer and who isn't.

@@1UPWonders "I didn't say you were a boomer" - i know that........

What happens where you're somewhere where there's no or limited internet connection? Don't you still want thousands of songs on usb, micro SD cards or CD/vinyl? Music is meant to be paid for and enjoyed. Spotify has damaged the music scene more than anything with singers making quick Bop music under 3 minutes as listeners are impatient now.

I used to think like you until I started Apple Music. I spend less on music each month and I have access to a large chunk of the world's music catalog in my pocket and it doesn't take up space in my home. My family won't have to sell it all or send it to the junkyard when I pop off. I feel like I have something for my money with streaming, because I can listen to any album when I want to, even guilty pleasures I would probably never have spent money on, because there was always something else I wanted to buy. So for the price of a CD each month, I get every new release each month.

Rare CDs on your shelf? Do you hear yourself? You buy CDs as interior ornament or as investment at best, not for the content recorded on them.

@@TinLeadHammer If you're not a collector then you wouldn't understand. Most of my CDs I bought for the music recorded on them and the artwork. It's just nice when I find a rare cd to add to my collection.

@@TinLeadHammer Do you hear yourself? Blimey your all over these comments big boy( you got to be a bloke with that attitude) judging what others are doing.Apparently you have met them all and know all their listening and buying habits. Grow up matey you sound like a snipe in the playground

@@necropink9200 You do understand that collecting trinkets and having unrestricted access to music you like are different things?

You were doing great until the last couple of lines! Actually streaming has killed/is killing the loudness war, everything is loudness-normalized noe, which means great potential for audio quality again. Not exploited by everyone, but still. Formats are moving lossless. A standard Apple music subscription gives you lossless 24bit/48kHz which is better than CD.

The music I listen to I simply could not find if it wasn't for Spotify. I listen to bands with under 10k monthly listeners (rare to go over 100k), it is incredibly rare for a band to become widely known, bands like Modest Mouse, Wild Child, Bright Eyes, Kishi Bashi, Twenty One Pilots, and Youth Lagoon. My Spotify Wrapped told me I listened to 2'345 (I didn't just type ascending numbers, it just happened to be that and it's easy to remember) bands in 2022, and all but maybe 100 have never been played on the radio or got any form of recognition. They wouldn't be in a record shop. The medium for supporting artists has changed from buying music to buying merch or supporting on Patreon or Ko-fi (pretty much all of the small artists I listen to I can find on RU-vid and they often have a way to donate). Yes Spotify means that artists earn less, but Spotify allows people to earn something and to provide a platform for discovery, and many get a small but devoted fanbase that provides enough income to work full time as a musician while not necessarily getting super rich from it. If everyone liked popular music then yes CDs would be far superior for supporting artists, but that isn't the real world. Spotify has opened up a world of people not needing to make music to be popular, but to make what they enjoy and for the audience to be led to them. My Discover weekly is 30 fresh songs that range from good to amazing from people who may have only just released their first songs. Songs that Spotify analysed and knew I would love. So yeah, streaming services screw over the people creating popular music who aren't themselves popular. If you get lots of streams you do well, if you wouldn't have got any sales without the platform you do well.

I have MP3s that I downloaded 20 years ago, so yes, I do think that. The wonderful thing about data is that you can copy and back it up as many times as you like, so the idea of hard drive failure is a non-issue. That includes both local backups and off-site these days, both of which are now relatively inexpensive and accessible to all. The vast majority of my music is in FLAC format and backed up, meaning I have the best of all worlds in terms of sound quality, convenience and long-term archival security.

Do you know CD surface degrades and in 30 years become unreadable? Not a long-term backup solution for sure. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot

I have cds from 1990. Still play fine on my cd player. I think it's an urban legend that cds have a finite playing life span.

Lol I remember those 🙈

Soulseek was like the master key though if you were into obscure/underground stuff.

Having your own digital audio collection is still better than streaming (which is basically just downloading and listening to files on the spot, without owning them). Streaming is convenient but you're at the mercy of the streaming services.

can't beat having a box of vinyl or shelf of cd's though.

How did you get mp3 files, much less a portable mp3 player long before 1998?

Quantity over quality. Maybe as a background music while driving the car or travelling on bus, tube or train, but at home, really? Nothing compare to the real uncompressed original recording on vinyl, reel to reel, cd or high end cassette read on a good quality hifi or studio equipment.

​ @Doug Fisher I never had anything portable. My switch over to digital happened with the Amiga computer that came out in 1985. I didn't get mine when it first came out. Not sure of the exact year I got mine now. mp3's didnt exist at that point but you had WAV which is uncompressed so pretty easy for any computer at that time. It had big file sizes, but with hard drives increasing rapidly in size it wasn't a big problem. I played around with the first mp1 which sounds weird saying that now. MP3 is what we all know but there was a v1! lol I think mp1 was actually mp2 but for dummies. mp2 just wouldn't play in real-time at any bitrate. And as for mp3, wow that was so demanding for the computers at the time it came out but I don't really remember when I switched over to that. I just remember getting my first PC so I jumped to a computer a hundred times faster lol and that was just mental how fast that was. Suddenly playing highly compressed music formats like mp3's was just not an issue. On the Amiga just encoding one track to mp1 would take hours. Anyway just pointing out the digital revolution was going on a long time before 1998, it was just a bit janky to start with but also exciting as it was all rapidly evolving month to month.

Yeah! And Sam Goody.

It's not as nice as having a record collection though

@@tomjoslin435 Nope, it's way better, fast and easy access wherever you are. Record collection is just to show off, got rid of mine, about 1900 cds, have it all digitally now. Way easier.

"playlists are how new music gets discovered these days" Just as mix tapes/CDs were how music got discovered before...

Ah yes I used to have an excellent collection of MIDI files that sounded awesome with my sound card

Mod files too, they were really popular back then.

MP3 as a standard will stay with us for decades. And in this video MP3 was equated with compressed digital music formats. AAC is the successor of MP3 and is being used by itunes. Other streaming services use lossless compression codecs like FLAC. And regarding vinyl winning: It's just a personal anecdote, but since the advent of MP3, I have never bought any music since then and my collection consists of over 100,000 songs.. So people buying music is now heavily biased towards groups how aren't very tech savvy and also fall for snake oil. In this sense these stats aren't representative anymore of the popularity of physical vs. digital medium.

How would digital have a shelf life less then vinyl?

@@ambeegaming76 various reasons why CD’s have a limited shelf life. The main one has been down to the manufacturing process. Poorly manufactured CD’s and other optical discs can suffer from disc rot. It’s not rare to find it on a early CDs and seems to be widespread on Laser discs. CD’s that have been manufactured and stored correctly would last for centuries.

@@MATTY110981 I said Digital not CD of course a CD is going to degrade but Digital shouldn't have a shelf life.

@@ambeegaming76 Hard drive degrade over time.

@@MATTY110981 But the file can be moved to another drive or storage medium without loss of quality.

If you got online in 2007 then you should of got Spotify Free when that launched in 2008 if you are in the UK or just use iTunes not crappy RU-vid videos

@@pyeltd.5457 I'm sure you're right, but it was never too bad a sound quality on RU-vid enough to drive me away elsewhere.

Because cd is much higher quality than youtube and mp3.

good god, you're still converting youtube to mp3? mp3 can sound good, but youtube is already heavily compressed, and those conversion tools frequently compress them *again* CD allow for full quality, giving you full control over the files, and will actually play gaplessly (which some services still struggle with)

I buy CD because it's physical (i.e. get the sense of it being a real thing you can touch/hold), which means a lot to me. Sure vinyl has the same benefits but it's less flexible due to its larger size (can only use it indoors) and the fact it breaks the bank. CD is extremely cheap. Streaming is the same as renting; you don't own the music, so it's not what I'd want.

Yer I saw a documentary on that a few years ago, the USA were starting to update it silos that were dependent on no ancient 8-inch floppy disks from the 1960s FFS ... nuked by old tech ...

I really didn't see that one coming. The phone ate everything.

@@ClayMann I play MP3s off my smartphone.

@@TinLeadHammer that's my point. The phone replaced the mp3 player, it ate it. The phone ate the mp3 player market is what I was trying to say just like it ate the camera market

I still have an mp3 player. Haven't been able to use it since windows 7.

Not for me, I still use mine when I'm out and about. But then again, I'm one of those old-fashioned chaps who still listen to the radio every now and then and don't need Internet everywhere all the time.

I still say on purpose (being 50) to my mates Gen-Z'er the "Inter-Web" just to sound old (while kicking their ass at FIFA), they think it's funny, haha, truth be told I'm well into tech and know much more than them (IT business systems' manager, gamer, programmer and restorer of useful old tech)

The World Wide Web was an upgrade of the original Internet that made it much more accessible and easier to use. The EU tried to get people to adopt WWW or "Internet Superhighway" as a way to distinguish the post-1991 Internet from the pre-1991 Internet but neither name really stuck.

Or the ‘Information Superhighway’

Uh... this was the original image. The BBC had been making wide-screen programmes since 1998.

@@marvy3022 no you can it see in the way they scaled the frame

This is the original image. You can see in other videos they keep the original frame size when it's 4:3.

@@markvandermolen7181 This seems to be the original 14:9 transitory format. It sucks though that when they upload 4:3 they stick into into a 16:9 frame.

@@marvy3022 1995 actually, with Last of the Summer Wine being the earliest example I know of with the episode 'The Glory Hole'.

IMHO the Music should be first. Not whether it's a physical object, a live experience or a digital file. The music is first. If you want to collect nice looking things, great. But it's a blinkered viewpoint. And your comment about 'not being touched up by a computer' is somewhat delusional - in the last 40 or so years everything from Classical recordings to the most folky of folk music is likely to have been assisted by a computer to improve the end result - in those 2 cases usually in post-production/mastering.

I think that ship sailed and you've just got a really good telescope to see it. Its telling that you can buy speakers that have no way to play physical music. And in mono, who saw that coming? The mono speaker takes over, SMH

​@@aeiouxs There is an argument to be made that music is enriched when engaged with as many of the senses as possible. Physical media not only gives you something to put on a shelf and look at but to and look at and play with, it's also often full of artwork and lyrics and other nick-knacks that you can engage with during your listening experience. Vinyl also introduces a ritual aspect to the act of listening. You don't put a record on for background or casual listening but to listen and experience an album from start to finish. By having to stand up, take it from the shelf, remove it from the sleeve, place it on the turntable and drop the needle then having to flip the record over midway through, it commands your full attention in a way digital music (and even CDs) can't replicate. Certainly buying pop music on physical media is pointless today as much of it is not made to be listened to be but to dance to, sing along to or just to fill silence, but when it comes to music made to be listened to physical media is more than an obsolete trinket to be relegated to history.

I don't need a physical object anymore, apart from liner notes, that would be nice on streaming. It's just adding to more plastic waste to the planet. But I understand what you mean. After you've unwrapped it though and are disappointed that there's only a few tracks you like on the album, you might wish you paid 10 quid per month to listen to all new releases that month.

The concept of holding canned music or movie in your hands is only a hundred years old. It will be quickly forgotten.

He's a pretty accurate summary of most 90s music industry people I ever met 😄

you cant get this on vhs tape

funny, but that's a meaningless comment. consuming media is not an either/or position. many people buy physical and stream stuff as well

@@qzh Not sure where Simon lad is seeing all these comments proclaiming the wonders of physical product?? Seems the other way to me, lots of smug planks with their i have a million songs on my Spotify so poo bums to records.

@@Ridersonthestorm8899 I stream music on RU-vid... it was just a comment,lots of vinyl worshipers with the hipster crowd is all,we used to call them 45s,records or LP's

now that's huffing the copium. Streaming accounts for almost all music consumed today. I'd bet that any physical media bought is used mainly for decoration.

It used to be king for me, not anymore... I can open my phone and stream every new album for the cost of one CD per month. I will admit I miss the liner notes. Hopefully one day that will come to the streaming platforms.

I started using cassettes recently out of curiosity and now for practical reasons. The sound is remarkably good I must add. Since I don't pay for any services I Instead bring a cassette for my portable "walkman" and car stereo.

@@rdrgtreer I think out of all the mediums for music, cassette was the one I enjoyed most. You can't buy any decent players anymore, anything new is garbage. You have to go back to the older players to find something with a great mechanism and features and those from what I've heard are getting rarer. Anyway as long as you're enjoying it, bah who cares what's popular.

Except that in rural areas the Internet is probably poor, and the smartphone signal non existent!

@@antonioveritas Ah, but she *did* think of them!

@@markiliff And its the thought that counts!

No, they are the distribution companies.

What's bad about not having to deal with physical media? The data on your CDs is digital anyway. You do know, that you can set up a local streaming service, so you're 100% in control of your data and the output quality. If the digital data stream comes from your spinning disc or via WIFI doesn't matter a bit.

You would require an army capable of infiltrating several global cities simultaneously to bring the Internet down (by destroying or shutting down one quarter of the master DNS servers) and even then it would only be offline for maybe a day as the remaining master servers would remap themselves around the missing ones. Also big sites like Spotify have backups of backups, any time they experience a drive failure and lose a drive with 10,000 songs the backup stored in a different location will put those 10,000 songs on to a new drive, at no point is there ever less than two copies of something in the cloud. Lastly, most people download the albums they own so even if Spotify did go away you would still have your songs on your phone or music player.

Boomer. Or hipster. :)

@@TinLeadHammer I'm not a hipster and I'm probably younger than you.