Roy Williams
9/17/2002
CPS 182
.Ogg’s Online Overtake
If one word peaks this interest of users, it’s “Free”. For one reason or another, everyone on the Internet assumes that it is their right to have whatever services or programs they want for free. We pay enough for our boxes, OS’s and ISP’s; the rest should be free, right? This theory seems to be the prevailing theory on the Internet. A quick visit to Download.com’s most popular downloads proves this[1]. Out of the top twenty-five downloaded programs, under the field “License”, twenty-one of these are considered “Free”. The other four are “Free to try”. Its this notion of free-ness that has lead to the dispersion of all of these programs, their success, and the added happiness of all the users that use it. Most of these programs actually turn a profit by selling ads, similarly to television, and the more users they have, the more they profit. If these programs weren’t free, then they almost definitely would not have enjoyed the same success. If follows then, that if there are two competing programs, both offering about the same quality level, but one is free and the other is not, the free one will become dominate. Lets take the story of the MP3 for example. MP3s had always been free to use up until now. Now, it cost money for a company to produce MP3 decoders, whether those decoders are free or not. Now, either all decoders will cost money, or there will not be any decoders available for the MP3 format, and people will turn to another format. But there are other formats available, Ogg Vorbis for one. After MP3 decoders begins to cost money, users will switch to Ogg Vorbis since it is free.
MP3’s have
become a standard in digital music, mostly because of its wide availability and
it’s being free to users and developers alike.
“The reason MP3 took off and
became the audio standard on the Web is that the original patent holders
made it freely available for anyone to develop a decoder, or player, for it.”[2] Other companies came up with proprietary
music compression schemes (Sun’s *.au, AT&T’s *.a2b), many of which were
more effective and had better sound quality, but these formats either cost
money, or they put limitations on how the developer could use their technology.2 But now, this has become a thing of the
past, only accessible by the Internet time machine The Wayback Machine[3]. Thomas Multimedia[4]
has declared, after MP3’s deep seeding in the internet culture,
they will start to charge developers to develop anything to do with MP3’s
whether it be a ripper, player, or encoder.
So what comes next for internet music?
Now enters Ogg Vorbis. This is a patent-free open source
music-compression utility. When the
people who originally were devolving utilities using the MP3 codec can no
longer afford/don’t want to pay for a license to use MP3, this is what they
most likely will switch to. Its
happened plenty of times on the internet before. Users are loyal until they have to pay money for a service. Napster is a good example of this. All of Napster’s users were always gung ho
about Napster, going so far as to e-mail all RIAA execs and boycotting certain
artists. But as soon as Napster begins
to cost money, all the users who would have fought to the ends of the earth to
preserve Napster are no where to be found, they had all switchted to different,
free, file swapping software. So now
that MP3 isn’t free and Vorbis is all the developers will switch to coding for
Vorbis and everyone on the web will just convert their libraries to Vorbis and
start using it, right?
Unfortunately, no. There are two main problems with this. First, MP3’s cannot be converted to the
Vorbis format. They are both considered
“Lossy” compression formats, which means that they ignore certain parts of the
sound that the human ear can not hear, but Vorbis and MP3 ignore different
parts of the song. Therefore, any
conversions between the two will result in a drop of quality.[5] The other problem is familiarity. “Familiarity is an important asset in the
world of information. It may often be true that the best way to raise demand
for your product is to give it away.”[6] Thomas Multimedia has done just that, they
gave away their licenses to use MP3s and now the demand is huge. There are already terabytes of MP3’s out
there, which cannot be converted.
Therefore, don’t expect to see .oggs littered all over Kazaa any time
soon. So this means that Vorbis will
most likely make its first move on the Internet with legitimate such as
Internet radio shows and backing up one’s music collection, not in trading
pirated music.
The fact is that there is a lot of
music pirating on the Internet , and it has been a cause for a number of
different recent lawsuits. If, after a
number of lawsuits, all the P2P servers & services get shut down, then this
would almost certainly bring a significant portion of pirated music trading
down. If no one is pirating music
anymore, the huge demand for MP3 players, encoders, and rippers plummets. If people can no longer get to other
people’s free music, where is most of the music on their computer going to come
from? Their own CDs! This is fair use! Oh Joy, we are allowed to listed to CDs that we own on our own
computers!! But now that MP3 rippers
and players cost money, what will the average consumer do? They will look for the staple of the
internet as we know it today, a free version of sound compression. Once people stop trading music, then MP3’s
have lost all of their advantage, mostly because there would no longer be a
vast pool for people to tap into to get their music, so they really don’t care
how they compress their own music.
If the Internet has shown us one thing, it’s that people love free stuff. In addition to this, they have very little product loyalty. If forced to pay for a product, the typical internet user will switch to a free format instead.