Barry Willis

Last year the music industry was jolted from its complacency by the rise of MP3, a scheme for the quick and easy transfer of digital audio files over the Internet. Legal attempts to block the format as a form of copyright violation failed, and the industry began scrambling to find a way to prevent the wholesale piracy of higher-resolution formats to come. The Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), an alliance of more than 240 hardware, software, and music-publishing companies, has been working overtime trying to develop an unobtrusive technique for preventing unauthorized copying—something that digital technology is making easier than ever.

After months of wrangling, the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) has announced its first set of standards for portable digital music devices. Manufacturers can now incorporate these standards into the designs of new products. Many industry observers believe that portables will be the next big wave in consumer audio, expected to hit the market by the winter holiday season.

Since the earliest days of stereo—the first experiments with more than single-channel sound happened back in the 1930s—recording and playback have been based on a horizontal model: left-center-right, left-rear, right-rear. "Laterality," as it's sometimes called, can be exploited very well in creating plausible sensations of spatial events, especially by film-industry sound engineers. The believable reproduction of music is considerably more problematic.

Folk wisdom has it that it's wiser not to lock the gate after the horses have escaped. The Secure Digital Music Initiative, a consortium of 140 music, software, and hardware companies, has taken that adage to heart. In a significant departure from its original intent to block the distribution of free music on the Internet, the Secure Digital Music Initiative announced in the last week of June that its forthcoming specification for music software and hardware will accommodate the "legacy content" already in existence. There are reportedly as many as 500,000 songs available in the MP3 format, and they will continue to be available even as new, robustly encrypted music comes onto the market.