MP3@25: A Quarter Century of the MP3
MP3@25 is a free online exhibition I curated for the Museum of Portable Sound that opened to the public on 14 July 2020 – the 25th anniversary of the day the engineers at the Fraunhofer Institute (the developers of MP3 compression) decided via email vote to name its file extension ‘.MP3’.
The exhibition explores the origins of the MP3, assesses its immediate impacts on culture across a variety of media, and examines its legacy now that it has ‘officially’ been declared a dead format. The centrepiece gallery of the exhibition explores the uneasy relationship Suzanne Vega’s iconic 1987 recording Tom’s Diner (a capella) has with the history of the early development of the MP3, presenting four versions of the song: Vega’s original 1987 recording; her 2012 re-recording of the song onto an Edison wax cylinder; composer Ryan Maguire’s 2014 composition moDernisT, which presents only the frequencies of Vega’s original recording that are lost when it is converted into an MP3; and finally, a downloadable MP3 file of the Edison wax cylinder recording, prepared exclusively for this exhibition.
Other galleries discuss the history of software company Napster and how peer-to-peer, online ‘piracy’ of MP3s led to the deconstruction of the worldwide recording industry; Apple’s iTunes software, iPod portable MP3 player, and iTunes Music Store, a trio of products that legitimised the MP3 as a commodity and then almost immediately rejected the format in order to sell files encoded with DRM – Digital Rights Management software that added a layer of copy protection so draconian that customers no longer owned their music, they simply rented it – paving the way for the streaming services of today; a collection of MP3-related scenes from popular films and television programmes from 2003 –2017; and an extensive Historical Timeline of the MP3, a blow-by-blow account of the innovations, lawsuits, and settlements that mark the history of the world’s most notorious file format.
I made several media appearances discussing the significance of the MP3’s 25th anniversary:
• The Revolution Will Be Digitised: 25 Years of the MP3 – Attack Magazine, UK
• L’Heritage du MP3 (The Legacy of the MP3) – La Dernière Heure, Belgium
• Marking a Quarter Century of MP3: Interview with John Kannenberg – Radio Survivor, San Francisco
