by Chris Gillham
Article by Chris Gillham, Webmaster Urban EXcentrics November 1998

Those many bands using the new mp3 audio technology to deliver their music to web surfers are not only cutting their own throats, but are damaging the internet music industry as a whole. mp3 can deliver high quality audio for visitors to band sites, but it sacrifices far too much download time to be a sensible medium for web presentation. How many of those visitors are patient enough to hang around for it? The internet has been swamped by an avalanche of mp3 files on band sites around the world over the past few months, during which time I've come to the conclusion that these are sites I should avoid. Just before writing this article and in an effort to prove myself wrong, I downloaded an mp3 song via MacAmp and my 28.8 modem. The 2.3meg file took almost 17 minutes to download, delivered 2'05" of music (which was lousy) and reminded me I should never again waste my time waiting to listen to music via mp3. I actually witnessed the grass growing in my backyard as I waited to hear some music (and my backyard sounded better than the band). There is no way the mums, dads and kids of the world are willing to wait quarter of an hour to hear some unknown music, irrespective of its quality (usually through a computer speaker anyway), when their reward is only half a song! They'll be dissuaded from visiting unknown (and known) band sites in future, particularly if they've found themselves waiting half an hour to hear a song or style they don't enjoy. Bands choosing mp3 are adopting an insular perspective of the internet. They are building their sites believing all their visitors will be devoted fans willing to wait around to hear their music, but they are forgetting that most of the world has never heard of them before. And they are forgetting the whole point of having a presence on the internet - marketing for new fans. Think about some of the problems with mp3. It takes an enormous amount of your isp server space - 2.3 meg for 2 minutes! You'll probably have to pay your isp for extra server space after just two songs. Your visitor has to be willing to sacrifice more than 3 meg of spare disc space for a 3 minute song download which they might not like. The download is pretty useless until it's converted via DVD to make it portable, and how many people so far have recordable DVD? Many visitors are paying on an hourly rate for web time, and 15 minutes for two minutes of music is a big chunk of that time. The vast, vast majority of net surfers have modems of 28.8 or less. mp3 might be acceptable for cable surfers, but I'm talking about the other 99% of the world. Few surfers have speaker systems wired into their computer which will do justice to a CD quality file in the first place. If bands are using mp3 because they can't bear the thought of their music being heard below studio quality, or if they think visitors should end up with a file they can play at any time in future, where's the logic? The few visitors who will download a song end up with a big file which maybe, just maybe, they can transfer to a CD. Great! You end up with either an existing fan or a new fan who has your song at CD quality. What do you achieve? A song sale? Nope... you gave it away. If it's as good as a CD, who needs royalties? Proponents of mp3 boast it's an encoding algorithm that compresses audio to about 10% of its original size. Which means it's a pretty good technology for saving audio on a disc - but a lousy technology for delivering it over the net. Other software technologies can deliver similar quality audio of identical length and not only use a fifth of the space of mp3, but deliver it to surfers in a semi-streaming format (e.g QuickTime3). And if you use technology which reduces your audio quality, you can cut the file size to well under 10% of mp3 versions - instantly streaming! (RealAudio) The more mp3 files appear on band sites around the world, the less people will be inclinded to visit those sites. This software might be OK for actual song sales on the net, but almost all independent bands set up a web presence to hopefully just be noticed. You don't get noticed if your talent is hidden behind a 15 minute barrier. Surfers want a "taste" of your music quickly. They've already spent enough time stumbling across your link and waiting for the download, reading a bit about you, and then waiting for the Sounds page to download. If surfers find most music sites they visit are demanding an inordinate wait, they'll pretty quickly become disillusioned and no longer visit any music sites. That diminishes the worldwide market and hurts everyone. This article is not intended to disparage the actual quality of mp3 audio, nor the excellent winamp and macamp players. It is intended to point out that mp3 will be a great audio delivery technique in about five to ten years, or however long it takes for most of the world to be on cable. In the meantime, it's easy to deliver your music to the world in a streaming or semi-streaming format with software which costs about the same, or little more. It's possible though not definite that winamp and macamp audio browser plug-ins are the most common among surfers. Trouble is, very few surfers have the time to use them. For the sake of all independent band sites on the WWW, including your own, think long and hard about the sense of putting big, time-consuming audio files on your site.

This article first appeared in the Guitar Newsletter #15, Nov 5, 1998