That said, the same NPR article does conclude that:

Motherboard offered one of the more sober responses around, arguing that MP3 isn’t really going anywhere just because the creator of it says so: what happens now is entirely out of Fraunhofer’s hands. In that vein, it makes sense for them to promote newer formats they’ve developed that can make them money, and not the one that doesn’t any longer.īut this is a very different story, one of soulless balance sheets, and more mundane than the death of MP3. From a business perspective, Fraunhofer cares about the formats for which they can still charge money for patent licensing (for example, the AAC format). MP3 is dead to Fraunhofer because the patents recently expired on the algorithm itself. “Dead” = “We Can’t Make Money Off It”? The original audio team at Fraunhofer IS (image via ) Unfortunately, other writers (going for clickbait gold) were happy to inform their readers that - sorry folks - the MP3 is dead. This NPR story appears to have been the patient zero of this story, although they were quite deliberate about adding a caveat:īut now, 22 years later, the MP3 truly is dead, according to the people who invented it. Over the past week, you might have read articles announcing MP3 as one of the casualties of 2017.Įspecially if you’re listening to an MP3 while reading, it’s probably surprising to discover what you’re actually hearing in your ears is not actually music, but the lamentable cries of a now-departed format.įraunhofer, the German research organization, where Karl-Heinz Brandenburg and colleagues developed the MP3 format, declared MP3 dead to them.

Why not declare MP3 dead? We’ll get more clicks! What would have to change? Is it even a vaguely realistic possibility considering what tools people are using to play music? Keep reading for an in-depth analysis. In today’s article, contributor Steven Maude assesses what it would take take for a new file format to replace MP3. Any DJ with a sizable collection of music on their hard drive knows that the MP3 is far from dead, despite a rash of clickbait articles in recent weeks.

Poor decisions mp3