Reference

Sidebar 2: On Karlheinz Brandenburg and MP3

In the March 2018 issue of Stereophile, in my account of the involvement of Karlheinz Brandenburg and the Fraunhofer Institute's facilitation of MP3 and file sharing, I inadvertently aped Brandenburg's own sanitized account. In interviews, Brandenburg has claimed that, in 1997, an Austrian graduate student bought a copy of the MP3 encoder and shared it online via an FTP site; that's the account I repeated last month. But in his excellent book How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention (Viking Penguin, 2015), Stephen Witt makes a strong case that Brandenburg and his team of engineers had begun giving away encoders at audio shows several years before that, in an ultimately successful effort to win the race against MP2 and other competing technologies. Brandenburg has often stated his opposition to file sharing. But if Witt's account is correct, Brandenburg's business decisions—intentional and shrewd—contributed directly to the creation of the file-sharing ecosystem that decimated the record industry ca 2000.—Jim Austin