The Evolution Of Portable Music [Infographic]

With the mp3 file format came a whole new revolution of technology and also a lot of whining from the record companies. Being a writer and producer myself, I particularly remember when the record and publishing companies started to blame their lousy innovative thinking regarding dropping sales due to mp3 sharing. In a way, they were right, but I also know that multinational record companies actually talked to Napster themselves to distribute their new music to get a bigger spread. It’s all unconfirmed; however, since I’m in this industry, I know that everyone is talking about it and usually when companies go out of their way to deny it, there is some truth to it.

Portable music goes way farther back then to the mp3 file. It actually started in 1954 with the world’s first portable transistor radio. I bet the quality of that badboy wasn’t exactly satisfying, but as long as it gave some sort of music, news or entertainment, I am sure it impressed a heck of a lot of people. Since then, we’ve gone through a whole boat load of technologies in order to end up with today’s computer format.

The compression format is constantly getting better due to better algorithms to compress the music. We also see a whole lot of next generation gadgets that support these formats. Not too long ago, we had mp3 players that only played music and really didn’t have many other functions. However, today we have hard drives in pretty much every gadget which allows us to store and play music directly from our own cell phones. That is a huge leap and that is why Apple, for example, has made a killing for themselves. The question now really is, where do we go from here? What will be the next format and gadget that we will adapt into our lifestyle like our lives depended on it?

Click Image To Enlarge

Via: [Tech King]