MP3 Losing Steam?

15 Oct, 2004 at 5:20pm ET Article published in Tech

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

Comments

15 Oct 2004 ~ 5:52pm 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
15 Oct 2004 ~ 6:04pm Thrax What TheBaron said.
15 Oct 2004 ~ 6:53pm Cyclonite Ditto.
15 Oct 2004 ~ 6:56pm primesuspect It's AAC and iTunes for me
15 Oct 2004 ~ 7:21pm BLuKnight MP3 all the way.
15 Oct 2004 ~ 7:28pm Nosferatu MP3
15 Oct 2004 ~ 7:29pm Medlock 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.
15 Oct 2004 ~ 7:32pm keto There are other formats?
15 Oct 2004 ~ 8:50pm mmonnin Exactly.
15 Oct 2004 ~ 9:02pm 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.
15 Oct 2004 ~ 10:56pm PirateNinja I use ogg when I rip things. If I download, of course its mp3.
16 Oct 2004 ~ 9:56am Riddick am-pee-three.
16 Oct 2004 ~ 10:24am Armo "The NPD Group's MusicWatch Digital who track the contents of people's hard drives"

WTF!!!!!
16 Oct 2004 ~ 12:09pm drasnor FLAC.

-drasnor
16 Oct 2004 ~ 1:36pm Camman

TheGr81 wrote:

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 Oct 2004 ~ 2:38pm Leonardo I use the FM and AM file formats!
16 Oct 2004 ~ 7:30pm 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.
17 Oct 2004 ~ 1:16am comfortable

Armo wrote:

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

WTF!!!!!

Yeah, that raised an eyebrow here, too.
17 Oct 2004 ~ 5:34pm Armo glad to see it wasnt just me
17 Oct 2004 ~ 7:55pm groove MPC is the future
17 Oct 2004 ~ 10:12pm muddocktor I still use MP3 myself too.