The History Of Streaming Music

Severe Tire Damage. Like many things we cover in this podcast, the first streaming rock band on the Interwebs came out of Xerox PARC. 1993 was a great year. Mariah Carey released Dreamlover, Janet Jackson released That’s The Way Love Goes. Boyz II Men released In The Still of the Nite. OK, so it wasn’t that great a year. But Soul Asylum’s Runaway Train. That was some pretty good stuff out of Minnesota. But Severe Tire Damage was named after They Might Be Giants and a much more appropriate salvo into the world of streaming media. The members were from DEC Systems Research Center, Apple, and Xerox PARC. All members at the time and later are pretty notable in their own right and will likely show up here and there on later episodes of this podcast. So they kinda’ deserved to use half the bandwidth of the entire internet at the time.

The first big band to stream was the Rolling Stones, the following year. Severe Tire Damage did an opening stream of their own. Because they’re awesome. The Stones called the stunt a “good reminder of the democratic nature of the Internet.” They likely had no clue that the drummer is the father of ubiquitous computing, the third wave of computing. But if they have an Apple Watch, a NEST, use an app to remotely throw treats to their dog, use a phone to buy a plane ticket, or check their Twitter followers 20 times a day, they can probably thank Mark Weiser for his contributions to computing. They can also thank Steve Rubin for his contributions on the 3D engine in the Mac. Or his wife Amy for her bestselling book Impossible Cure.

But back to streaming media. Really, streaming media goes back to George O Squier getting patents for transmitting music over electrical lines in the 1910s and 1920s. This became Muzak. And for decades, people made fun of elevator music. While he originally meant for the technology to compete with radio, he ended up pivoting in the 30s to providing music to commercial clients. The name Muzak was a mashup of music and Kodak, mostly just for a unique trademark. By the end of the 30s Warner Brothers had acquired Muzak and then it went private again when George Benton, the chairman and publisher of the Encyclopædia Britannica pivoted the company into brainwashing for customers, alternating between music and silence in 15 minute intervals and playing soft tones to make people feel more comfortable while waiting for a doctor or standing in an elevator. Makes you wonder what he might have shoved into the Encyclopedia! Especially since he went on to become a senator. At least he led the charge to get rid of McCarthy who referred to him as “Little Willie Benton.” I guess some things never change. Benton passed away in 1973, but you can stream an interview with him from archives.org ( https://archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc.95761 ).

Popularity of Muzak waned over the following decades until they went bankrupt in 2009. After reorganization it was acquired in 2011 and is now Mood Media, which has also gone bankrupt. I guess people want a more democratic form of media these days. I blame the 60s. Not much else happened in streaming until the 1990s. A couple of technologies were maturing at this point to allow for streaming media. The first is the Internet. TCP/IP was standardized in 1982 but public commercial use didn’t really kick on until the late 1980s. We’ll reserve that story for another episode. The next is MPEG.

MPEG is short for the Moving Picture Experts Group. MPEG is a working group formed specifically to set standards for audio and video compression and the transmission of that audio and video over networks. The first meeting of the group was in 1988. The group defined a standard format for playing media on the Internet, soon to actually be a thing (but not yet). And thus the MPEG format was born. MPEG is now the international standard for encoding and compressing video images. Following the first release they moved quickly. In 1992, the MPEG-1 standard was approved at a meeting in London. This gave us MPEG Layer 3, or MP3 as well as video CDs. At the Porto meeting in 1994, we got MPEG-2 standard, thus DVDs, DVD players and AAC standard a long standard for iTunes and used for both television and audio encoding. MPEG-4 came in 1999, and the changes began to slow as adoption increased. Today, MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 are under development.

Then came the second wave of media. In 1997, Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev built WinAmp. A lot of people had a lot of CDs. Some of those people also had WinAmp or other MP3 players and rippers. By 1999 enough steam bad been built up that Sean Parker, Shawn Fanning, and John Fanning built a tool called Napster that allowed people to trade those MP3s online. At their height, 80 million people were trading music online. People started buying MP3 players, stereos had MP3 capabilities, ...