How Music Got Free Read Online Free PDF Page A

backing. The MUSICAM group was really just a proxy for Philips, and Philips was visionary. The company was making a fortune in licensing from the compact disc, but already, in 1990, with CD sales just starting to outpace vinyl, it was looking to control the market for its eventual replacement.
    This farsighted strategic planning was complemented by a certain gift for low cunning. By this time, both Brandenburg and Grill were beginning to suspect that the suits at Philips were influencing MPEG’s decisions by lobbying behind the scenes. Johnston, the American,shared these suspicions of favoritism, and scoffed at the ridiculous three-tiered “layer” scheme, a last-minute rule change MPEG had made only when its favored team looked likely to lose. Brandenburg, Grill, and Johnston all used the same word to describe this emergent phenomenon: “politics”—a hateful state of affairs in which personal relationships and business considerations trumped raw scientific data.
    MPEG defended its decisions and denied any allegations of bias. MUSICAM researchers were indignant at the suggestion. Still, history showed that, from the AC/DC “Current Wars” of the late nineteenth century to the VHS-Betamax battle of the 1980s, victory didn’t necessarily go to the best, but to the most vicious. From Edison to Sony, the spoils were won by those who not only promoted their own standard, but who cleverly undermined the competition. There was a reason they called it a format “war.”
    The Fraunhofer team, consisting of young, naive academics, were unprepared for such a battle. Over the next few years, in five straight head-to-head competitions, they got swept. Standardization committees chose the mp2 for digital FM radio, for interactive CD-ROMs, for Video Compact Disc (the predecessor to the DVD), for Digital Audio Tape, and for the soundtrack to over-the-air HDTV broadcasting. They chose the mp3 for nothing.
    In discussions with other engineers, the team kept hearing the same criticism: that the mp3 was “too complicated.” In other words, it ate up too much computer processing power for what it spit out. The problem could be traced to Philips’ baneful filter bank. Half of the “work” the mp3 did was just getting around it. In the engineering schematics explaining mp3 technology, the flowchart showed how Brandenburg’s algorithm sidestepped the filter bank entirely,like a detour around a car crash.
    The Fraunhofer team began to see how they’d been outmaneuvered. Philips had convinced Fraunhofer to adopt its own inefficient methodology, then pointed to this exact inefficiency to sink them with the standards committees. Worse, engineers there seemed tohave started a whisper campaign, to spread the word about these failures to the audio engineering community at large. It was a commendable piece of corporate sabotage. They’d tricked Fraunhofer into wearing an ugly dress to the pageant, then made fun of them behind their backs.
    But Brandenburg was not one to cry in the corner—ugly dress or not, he was determined to win. In July 1993, he was given a Fraunhofer directorship. Though he had zero business experience and was fighting from a losing position, he drove his team at all hours. Around this time a gang of thieves broke into the Erlangen campus in the middle of the night, making off with tens of thousands of dollars in computing equipment. Every division was hit, save for the floor that housed audio research. There, at some dead hour of the night, long after everyone else had gone home, two mp3 researchers were still in the listening lab, deaf to the world in their expensive Japanese headphones.
    This dedication brought results. By 1994, the mp3 offered substantial improvements in audio quality over the mp2, although it still took slightly longer to encode. Even at the aggressive 12 to 1 compression ratio, the mp3 sounded decent, if not quite stereo quality. Twelve years after a patent examiner had told Seitzer it was