MP3 Losing Steam?

KingFish (KingFish) After years as the unrivaled king of the digital-media world, the venerable MP3 music format is losing ground to rival technologies from Microsoft and Apple Computer.

October 15, 2004 5:20 PM ET in News,

After years as the unrivaled king of the digital-media world, the venerable MP3 music format is losing ground to rival technologies from Microsoft and Apple Computer.

MP3 is still the overwhelming favorite of file traders, but the once-universal format’s popularity has been going quietly but steadily down in personal music collections for the last year. According to researchers at The NPD Group’s MusicWatch Digital who track the contents of people’s hard drives, the percentage of MP3-formatted songs in digital-music collections has slid steadily in recent months, down to about 72 percent of people’s collections from about 82 percent a year ago. “People are still getting MP3s and putting them on hard drives but are deleting them at a rate faster than they’re acquiring them,” said Isaac Josephson, a researcher at NPD MusicWatch Digital. “People tend to think that downloads are more disposable than rips (copies from a CD), and currently, the lion’s share (of MP3s) are downloads.”

Source: c|net

21 Comments

  1. 15 Oct '04, 9:52 pm TheBaron

    mp3 is still all I use, except for the occassional .ogg or .flac

    you definitely wont find me touching WMA, and AAC would require me to use iTunes, which I despise

  2. 15 Oct '04, 10:04 pm Thrax

    What TheBaron said.

  3. 15 Oct '04, 10:53 pm Cyclonite

    Ditto.

  4. 15 Oct '04, 10:56 pm primesuspect

    It's AAC and iTunes for me

  5. 15 Oct '04, 11:21 pm BLuKnight

    MP3 all the way.

  6. 15 Oct '04, 11:28 pm Nosferatu

    MP3

  7. 15 Oct '04, 11:29 pm TheGr81

    Am I the only newbie that still rips WMAs? The overwhelming majority of my collection is mp3, but I need to convert my WMAs when it comes time to burn CDs.

  8. 15 Oct '04, 11:32 pm keto

    There are other formats?

  9. 16 Oct '04, 12:50 am mmonnin

    Exactly.

  10. 16 Oct '04, 1:02 am Thrax

    To me, the only lossy alternative to MP3 is OGG, and it's slower to rip than MP3, so I usually don't use it.

  11. 16 Oct '04, 2:56 am Gravite2090

    I use ogg when I rip things. If I download, of course its mp3.

  12. 16 Oct '04, 1:56 pm Riddick

    am-pee-three.

  13. 16 Oct '04, 2:24 pm Armo

    "The NPD Group's MusicWatch Digital who track the contents of people's hard drives"

    WTF!!!!!

  14. 16 Oct '04, 4:09 pm drasnor

    FLAC.

    -drasnor

  15. 16 Oct '04, 5:36 pm Camman
    Quoting TheGr81

    Am I the only newbie that still rips WMAs? The overwhelming majority of my collection is mp3, but I need to convert my WMAs when it comes time to burn CDs.

    Nope, I always rip new CDs I get to WMA with WMP10, and I DL songs in WMA w/MSN Music now...so I don't really use mp3 at all, I still have a lot of them but don't really aquire any new ones now.

  16. 16 Oct '04, 6:38 pm Leonardo

    I use the FM and AM file formats!

  17. 16 Oct '04, 11:30 pm KingFish

    hehe
    It's still mp3 for me too. I don't believe you'll have a revolution like when the mp3 format was introduced.

  18. 17 Oct '04, 5:16 am comfortable
    Quoting Armo

    "The NPD Group's MusicWatch Digital who track the contents of people's hard drives"

    WTF!!!!!

    Yeah, that raised an eyebrow here, too.

  19. 17 Oct '04, 9:34 pm Armo

    glad to see it wasnt just me

  20. 17 Oct '04, 11:55 pm groove (Guest)

    MPC is the future

  21. 18 Oct '04, 2:12 am muddocktor

    I still use MP3 myself too.

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