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« on: February 14, 2008, 09:22:53 AM »
mp3s will never die, at least not for quite a while. for starters, among users it is the one format that is not proprietary and does not carry DRM. while DRM can be added to it, in theory i suppose, it is not part of mp3. this is why it will always be superior to things like .aac or .wmv, etc. Companies are actually starting to turn back to it because there is so much bullshit going on with well 1) trying to figure out if there is any way to make money from downloads that is not itunes, which doesn't necessarily make money from downloading, and 2) how to fix the fact that only certain music plays on certain players.
As to the fact that it might be done away with because of extra storage and booming bandwidth. The former might be true, storage is growing, but the later is certainly not true, particularly in the US. The US, while it has the highest number of broadband users, is slipping in broadband penetration. This is due to a lot of reasons. Regardless, what the FCC classifies as broadband is 200kps. This is about 10X slower than what countries such as South Korea or others consider broadband. That said, some of those countries, such as S.Korea, where you can download movies onto your phone (its true) have caps on the amount of info you can download per month. This is what US companies would like to enforce and there are current battles over this, such as you see with what Comcast is trying to do.
Short point, mp3 will not go away because while broadband capacity will rise over the next generations the amount of control the ISPs will exert due to legislation or their own interests, will mean that trading large files will not be tenable.
at least that is one view of it.