I Want My Mp3

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

After months of fear, loathing and litigation, the music and consumer-electronics industries have decided to try to make beautiful music together. Last week the Secure Digital Music Initiative--a coalition of 100 music, electronics and high-tech companies--announced that it was provisionally blessing a controversial music format known as MP3.

MP3, in case you've lost your abbreviations handbook, is a compression scheme that allows the digital music in CDs to be shrunk to a tenth its size and still sound great. MP3 songs are small enough to be traded online, and they are by the millions--to the consternation of record companies, which fear that everything ever released on disc will end up online for free.

That's why the recording industry sued little Diamond Multimedia when it started selling a portable MP3 player last year. Not only did Diamond win in court, but it also sold 100,000 Rios along the way. With half a dozen other companies racing to produce their own versions of the Rio for Christmas, what could the music industry do?

It couldn't ignore MP3, which has become the format of choice among new bands trying to break in and vets looking for prerelease buzz. So the industry blessed it on one condition: within 18 months, when a standard is adopted that allows piracy-protected music to be sold online, the electronics companies agree to make their players compliant. What's next? Digitally pirated movies. Get ready, Hollywood.

--By Joshua Quittner