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If you have ever listened to an MP3 audio file, you probably only noticed that they sound pretty good, and can be stored en masse on even the smallest of hard drive spaces. But if you have ever wondered to yourself, “where did these wonderful MP3s originate from,” the answer is actually Europe. Beginning in 1977, a German company known as Fraunhofer-Gesellshaf worked on the digital compression technology which eventually went into the MPEG-1 standard, and made the MP3 file format possible. The original intention was to make use of the relatively limited hardware of the day, which simply could not handle the WAV files which were pretty much all the music world had to work with at the time.
In 1989, Fraunhofer was granted the patent on the technology which allows MP3 encoding to take place. In this day and age they license it out, but it was a very significant leap forward at the time. In 1991, the very first successful MP3 codec was released. According to Fraunhofer, the file format suffered from an early glitch which almost cost the entire thing its existence. Consider that if they had given up in 1991, after almost 15 years of working out the various issues surrounding this format, all of the digital music which we have today would not exist as it is.
That is a pretty humbling thought. Fortunately, all of the kinks were worked out, and the MPEG-1 standard was released in 1993. At first, MP3s were all “on the down low,” with technically skilled people sharing ones that they had ripped from various music sources (generally CDs) amongst themselves. However, the first company to release MP3 audio online was a record label called Sub-Pop. Doing that in 1999, it basically paved the way for the massive tide of websites such as iTunes, which would almost have us believe that they were the ones who thought up the entire MP3 concept.
