Apple have discontinued the iPod Classic. Therefore, the age of the MP3 is over.
Who’d have thought that the MP3 – that piddly little file format that was once thought to have the potential to destroy all music – would ever be in need of defending?
Yet here we are in 2015, and articles are being written about the demise of the MP3.
We stream now, you see. And because we stream our music, we no longer need to fill our hard drives and our DAPs with thousands upon thousands of files of varying quality and variable bit rate. We’re free! This is a Good Thing!
Or so they’d have us believe. Every article I’ve read on this subject – all two of them – has presented the MP3 years as a sort of fiddly dark age. Streaming sites such as Spotify and SoundCloud have liberated us from the inconvenience – the indignity – of having to micromanage our music.
Now, I love Spotify. I use it almost every day, mainly to stream epic Grateful Dead jams. But did I immediately delete my 20,000+ MP3s the second I registered? Did I my eye. Doing so would have been an even stupider move than binning all my records and CDs upon first getting a laptop and an MP3 player.
Here are five reasons why MP3s are still relevant in the age of Spotify, and here’s an epic Grateful Dead jam to which you can groove whilst you read – assuming that you’re a very slow reader.
Note – Even when citing specific examples, I use “Spotify” to refer to all streaming services, and “MP3” to refer to all file formats – WMA, MP3, FLAC etc. This isn’t so much “MP3 vs. Spotify” as “Files vs. Streaming”. Also, for the sake of brevity, and for the sake of avoiding hypocrisy, I will refrain from discussing artist royalties here. This post is all about the listener.
Lord Gloom 