REAR VIEW

For most technologies there are traditionalists and early adopters. My friend Tony has just bought Fat Boy Slim on vinyl and doesn't even own a CD player. Meanwhile Chris Cain, What PC?'s editor, is busy selling off his DVD discs, presumably to replace them with some new bleeding-edge technology I've never heard of.

One technology I have heard of and which is set to rock the music industry right down to the vaults where all the old 78s are stored, is MP3. In case this whole thing has somehow passed you by, MP3 is the new music format that's set to revolutionise the way music is bought and sold. MP3 is actually short for MPEG Layer 3 and is a file format that compresses standard audio tracks into much smaller sizes without significantly reducing sound quality.

What's terrifying for the music company executives in their Porsches, used to the huge margins of conventional CDs (press for 30p, sell for £15) is that MP3 files are almost criminally easy to copy and distribute over the Internet. Just visit www.mp3.com to see how easy.

Or consider this. 250,000 singles sales will take most bands straight to the top of the UK singles chart. But that's less than the number of downloads of rock has-been Tom Petty's new single in the first two days after it went up on the MP3.com Web site.

In the middle of June, the music industry suffered a further blow when a US federal court ruled that the Diamond MP3 player does not violate anti-piracy laws because it does not qualify as a 'digital recording device'.

Diamond's Rio MP3 player, with nearly a quarter of a million sales to date, is just one of several players now on the market that make Sony Walkmans look like breeze blocks and that can't jump or skip like CD players because they contain no moving parts.

The music industry is now pinning its hopes on the Secure Digital Music Initiative, a new format that includes encryption and which they'll have more control over. It should catch on because it's the only format that hit songs from the big labels will be released on. But MP3 will survive supported by thousands of bootleg recordings and millions of young Net surfers who think MP3 players are cool. Meanwhile, my friend Tony is selling off his collection of vinyl. He tells me wax cylinders are the next big thing.

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