MP3 Audio Is Still Bizarrely Popular
People use Google to look up music all the time. The most popular place for the world to listen to music is through YouTube, which didn’t really surprise me. What did surprise me is that before people look for Spotify, Apple Music, or anywhere else, they look for an MP3 file. Two things shock me. First, people still listen to MP3 files. Second, MP3 files are bigger today than I had ever imagined.
Why MP3 Files Should Not Be Popular
I’m an audiophile. I have an audio interface plugged into my computer that feeds lossless sound through a gold plated cable into my open back Sennheiser headphones. All you need to take away from that sentence is that I care about sound. Here’s the basic reason why you should too.
Almost every listens to music. I know not everyone will just sit and listen to music to take it in like me, but music keeps us company in the car, while exercising, while working from home, and while getting ready for the day. Music is a part of our interests and for many people, their culture. While listening to music, doesn’t have to be expensive, it shouldn’t be poor quality if it doesn’t have to be. Yet, people aren’t just given poor quality. People are searching for it.
Once a song has been recorded, it can be exported as an audio file in a number of formats. Regardless of their variety, we can group all of them as either lossless or compressed. MP3 files are compressed audio. Essentially, this means that the sound quality is sacrificed in order to reduce the size of the file. This made sense in the early 2000’s when memory was expensive, but one can grab 128 GB of memory on Amazon for 20 bucks now.
As memory isn’t an issue any more, there’s no need for the MP3 file. It isn’t more expensive to release music in a higher quality format. I promise you that the musicians don’t prefer that you listen in MP3. Plus, while you may be used to MP3 at this point, you are doing a disservice to yourself by choosing poor quality audio when you don’t need to.
Yet, so many of you do choose MP3 nevertheless. While you may be like me before having looked into this and think that nobody uses MP3 files any more, allow me to explain to you how massive the MP3 industry still is.
The MP3 Industry Is A Massive Problem
I’m just going to jump right into it because the facts speak loud enough for themselves. MP3 searches are the 14th most common kind of search on Google. In March of 2021, MP3 searches were bigger than Google Translate, Netflix, and Coronavirus searches. Netflix has over 200 million users. The coronavirus has taken millions of lives. Yet before people sit back to watch some TV or read up on the pandemic they are living through, they feel the need to download some crappy music files.
If you search something like mp3 music for example, you’ll come across a page of nearly identical links. It doesn’t bring you to Soundcloud or Pandora. Instead, each of the websites are focused around allowing the user to download free MP3 files of the music of their choice. When Spotify came to the stage in 2011, the music industry looked at it as a way to combat piracy. As it turns out, piracy is alive and well.
MP3 download websites make money by pushing ads to users who download music, often by ripping the audio from YouTube links. While Spotify’s pay of $.003 to $.005 per stream isn’t making small artists rich, it at least leaves them with something. MP3 downloads do not.
Stop Downloading MP3’s
If we want our favorite artists to keep making music, we need to let them make a living. You can still buy their music on iTunes like I do or stream it on a variety of services. We can buy their merch or go to their shows. If there’s a time in your life where you can’t afford to pay for the music or a good streaming service, you can still do your part by sitting through the occasional ad on free services.
What we can’t do is continue to pirate their music. That choice isn’t just the difference between poor audio quality and good audio quality. It’s also the choice to gamble on whether our favorite starving artist will be able to pay their rent this month.
Paying for music is a win for the artist and the consumer. There’s no need to be a compromising leech when we can be a satisfied supporter.
