The trading of MP3's or digital music over the Internet is all ways going to be an important part of the music industry, and is an unrealistic goal to try to control. The cost of controlling the piracy issues over the Internet would cost record companies more money than what they are losing due to MP3 trading. The record industry is trying to fight the major sites and companies in court with copyright suits. Quinlan states "Although downloading music over the Internet and playing it back on computer or portable digital music players has become increasingly popular, major record labels have been slow to embrace distribution over the Web because of the difficulty in preventing unauthorized - and unpaid - copying of songs."
MP3 is a file format which compresses audio files to efficiently store the audio data in files that can be easily downloaded on the Internet. MP3 files are identified by the file extension MP3 and require specialized players which decompress the files and then play the audio files like a regular CD.
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English: Ray Ruffin at Sony Music Entertainment Ne...
Warner Bros. RecordsFor all practical purposes, MP3 files can be exact, near-perfect digital copies of the original recorded material. In other words, an MP3 file is a near-perfect copy of a CD and can be stored on a computer or other data storage media. MP3 shrinks audio files in such a way that sound quality is preserved, but the file size is significantly smaller than it would be as a regular CD song file. This means you are able to download an entire song in only a few minutes. After that, you can play the song instantly, as many times as you want, regardless of your modem speed Kimmel states "Quite simply, the technology behind the MP3 audio format allows for high
compression ratio and CD- quality...