Happy Birthday MP3 Player

The first MP3 player was introduced 10 years ago by a Korean manufacturer and ushered a new era in the musical industry with RIAA fighting every step of the way until now. The first MP3 player boasted 32MB flash storage with 8 songs.

Korean manufacturer Saehan Information Systems introduced the first MP3 player MPMan F10. It carried 32MB flash based storage and stored up to 8 songs sampled at 128 Kb/s and carried a sticker price of $250. The songs were transferred to the device via the parallel port compared to the USB and Firewire ports used now.

Then came Diamond with the Rio PMP300 and priced it at $200, the competition for MP3 players kick started from there on. PMP300 also transferred songs via the parallel port but it had a smart media slot and the users were able to increase the storage capacity. With Mp3.com, Diamond Rio owners were able to download mp3 songs.

Then Diamond was involved in a bitter and prolonged fight with RIAA (now famously called by bloggers as Recording Industry Ass. of America). Finally the two settled and simultaneously Microsoft developed DRM technology to protect the songs, which pleased the RIAA.

Then came Apple and its iPod which took over the market completely but there are many flash media players as well. Sony which had a huge lead in the Walkman category surprisingly didn’t produce any significant digital music player except for its proprietary MiniDisc format.

MP3 format is still going strong; even the RIAA which hated its birth is selling DRM free songs at Amazon, iTunes and other places now. If RIAA had been smart from the beginning MP3 would have grown even bigger than what is now.