Last week's announcement of the new Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) for online distribution of digital music was a play by music and technology industry executives to challenge the popular MP3 audio format.
But proponents of existing digital music compression formats, including MP3, are singing a happy tune.
"I think this is incredibly hopeful for the MP3 standard," said Pamela Evans, co-founder of Camas, Washington-based MusicMatch, a Web site that distributes music in MP3 format.
Despite the fact that digital music compression formats such as MP3, Liquid Audio, and A2B are already among the most popular software on the Internet, the various executives who spoke at the news conference took care not to single out any existing technologies as a likely basis for the new standard.
"The worldwide recording industry is committed to ensuring that the SDMI proposal will provide a winning solution for all parties . . . coupling vision with a strong commitment to build on those technologies that are already available," said Hilary Rosen, president and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America.
MP3, by far the most popular existing digital music compression format, has previously drawn fire from the RIAA and others in the commercial music industry because it can be used to distribute unauthorized copies of music.
But at Tuesday's press conference, SDMI members downplayed the piracy angle.
"MP3 is an important format, and our hope is this initiative will deliver ways to allow those artists who want to use MP3 and secure their music with that format to prosper," said Rosen. "They're now saying a lot of the things that the MP3 community and MP3.com has been saying for some time," said Michael Robertson, president of MP3.com, a commercial Web site featuring more than 10,000 MP3 files that are authorized by artists and available for download.
"To talk about open standards, to say that piracy isn't an important obstacle, to recognize that digital distribution is the future, those are all wonderful shifts in their overall public sentiments," said Robertson. "They weren't saying these things six months ago. They weren't even acknowledging that digital music was the future."
MP3 proponents believe that MP3's popularity will force the industry to choose it as a basis for the new standard. Given that the SDMI organizers don't expect to see products using the as-yet-undetermined technology until next year's holiday-shopping season, many believe by then it will be too late to turn the tide.
"Last year at this time, hardly anybody had heard of MP3. Today, there are millions of users and tons of legal content in the format," said Steve Grady, vice president of communications for online record label GoodNoise. "Where are we going to be a year from now?"
Grady noted that the waiting period may damage the fortunes of Liquid Audio and A2B, which are proprietary compression formats.
"Consumers can't be sure that formats like Liquid Audio are going to be supported by the new specs," said Grady. "This could be seen as freezing the market for current encrypted solutions [such as Liquid Audio and A2B], and it could have the effect . . . of pushing more people to MP3 . . . because it's already so ubiquitous."
However, the creators of Liquid Audio and A2B hardly worry about being left in the digital dust behind a new standard.
"We built our [music compression] system knowing that new codecs are going to evolve, new watermarking systems will evolve, and so on. So, we have a system that is flexible enough to adapt to evolving standards," said Bill Woods, director of marketing and communications for Liquid Audio, one of the members of the SDMI coalition.
"This doesn't mean that existing companies with their own standards have to go out of business," said a spokeswoman for A2B, a music compression software company owned by AT&T, an SDMI member. "It just means everyone has to implement in a different way and distinguish themselves; and we feel we can do that . . . If we have to change what we do a bit to fit the standard, we don't mind."
