Main Frame

Digitalization of audio music has revolutionized the music industry in many ways. The concurrent development of the Internet means that music can now be distributed in a brand new manner. In the past, consumers could purchase music only in the form of a CD or a cassette through a store. With digitalization, this means music can now be distributed directly to the consumers via the Internet without a middle store distributor. Cost is cut significantly because a middleman is bypassed, and packaging cost is reduced to essentially zero. This is evident by comparing the price of digital music and conventional CD. A conventional CD costs about $11-13, and for about the same price ($12.99), one can have unlimited access to digital music for a month at MP3.com (legally that is). If a consumer purchases 2 CDs on average, this will translate to almost a 50% reduction in price! Moreover, this allows consumers to have more flexibility to create their favorite combination of songs.

From the side of the artists, the reduction of cost means they can produce publicly-distributed music easier, and this may be especially important for new artists or artists who appeal only to a small group of consumers as they have limited resources. Moreover, they can expand into the world market with ease.

However, there is a significant limitation to marketing music through the Internet. As most consumers still only have access to the Internet via phone line (56K modem), downloading digital music can be a hassle. It may take over an hour to download a song, and this will offset the benefit of Internet distribution of digital music. Therefore, a method to expedite the transfer of digital music is a necessary development for this new form of music distribution.

Currently, compression of the digital music data is the best method to improve this transfer. The most popular compression algorithm used is MP3, which can compress the digital music data by up to 75% and thus can improve the speed of transfer significantly. Importantly, MP3 compression leads to only minimal loss of quality of the music that is not apparent to most consumers.