Little wealth or fame for Internet music pioneer
By Adam Tanner
ILMENAU, Germany, May 18 (Reuters) - At the top of a drab pre-fabricated building works the man who helped launch the Internet music revolution with a discovery that has brought him little fame or fortune in an era of overnight millionaires.
Karlheinz Brandenburg, 46, developed the MP3 format that dramatically compresses digital music files to a size small enough to allow easy downloading of songs over the Internet.
The compression, a result of years of research, spawned online music swap services such as Napster, with millions of fans downloading songs for free and the recording industry complaining of billions of dollars in lost revenue.
Brandenburg says the music industry, not he, deserves blame for the resulting music piracy because it failed to realise the potential of Internet music in the mid 1990s.
``I wouldn't subscribe to the view that the maker is never to be blamed. You have to show some responsibility but I think we have showed responsibility,'' he said.
``We tried to tell the music industry about it (in 1995) but we were not able to get any other response than 'that is nice, we'll look at it.'''
MANY YEARS OF RESEARCH
Brandenburg's road to MP3 began as an electrical engineering student in 1980. The digital music revolution was still far off; IBM (NYSE:IBM - news) started selling their first Personal Computer in 1981 and two years later music compact discs appeared.
In the early days, it took researchers 10 hours to decode a minute of digital music, something now done instantaneously.
After years of hard work, Brandenburg became lead researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute of Integrated Circuits near Munich and received a doctorate for his compression work.
In 1990, the Boston-based Christian Science Monitor news organisation became the first to use compressed digital audio to feed sound to radio stations.
The engineer was one of hundreds in Germany, the United States and elsewhere researching compression. But Brandenburg's work on Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) layer-3, later known as MP3, emerged as the standard after a new generation of faster computers in 1995 became able to decode compressed music in real time.
SOLITUDE STANDING
A visitor to his office in ``Haus M'' -- next to an identical ``Haus N'' -- climbs six floors by foot to his office in a converted dormitory room at the local university where Brandenburg heads Fraunhofer's electronic media group.
The room is sparse. A postcard of folk singer Suzanne Vega decorates the wall, a memento of the many hours Brandeburg spent perfecting music compression algorithms.
MP3 reduces a music file's size tenfold while maintaining near-CD quality fold by stripping away extraneous sound. To test the technique, Brandenburg needed music with a wide dynamic range, and settled on Vega's 1987 song ``Tom's Diner''.
``I am sitting in the morning at the diner on the corner,'' Brandenburg heard Vega sing over and over again as MP3 was born.
MP3 was standardised in 1991. By 1995 Brandenburg and his collaborators saw the potential to make MP3 the Internet audio standard and thought free downloads of an MP3 player over the Net would help establish its foothold.
The underground world of music file swapping was born. In some developing countries, MP3 meant all Beatles songs could be put on a single CD and sold for a few dollars on pirate markets.
In 1999, Napster started changing the way millions get music, and at times last year more Internet users searched for ``MP3'' than ``sex'', according to Searchterms.com.
``When sex moved back to number one and MP3 went down again, I said 'okay, there's hope for mankind,''', Brandenburg joked.
Fans were delirious about MP3, the music industry incensed.
Brandenburg said while his sympathies are with musicians, the industry hurt itself by failing to offer a better alternative.
``They have at least part of the blame for moving too slowly,'' he said. ``For me it was, of course this is going to happen because there is no legal channel to get music to customers.''
In December 1999, the industry struck back.
The world's biggest record labels - including Vivendi Universal's Universal Music, Sony Music , Warner Music (NYSE:AOL - news), EMI Group Plc (quote from Yahoo! UK & Ireland: EMI.L) and Bertelsmann AG's BMG -- sued Napster, saying it was a piracy haven that would cost them billions of dollars in lost music sales.
In March, a federal court ruled that Napster must block the trading of copyrighted files on its system. Brandenburg sees a long fight against Internet piracy continuing, with compact video files likely to become the next battleground.
``MP3 and free music offerings from people who want it for free will be there for a long time,'' he said. "If it is done right, paid music will be there as a supplementary channel.
``I still see a big future for the music industry.''
COMPRESSED WEALTH
MP3's soaring popularity did not significantly enrich Brandenburg although his non-profit, government-established institute owns the patent and he is entitled to a royalty.
In a country where entrepreneurial spirit is less common than in America, the engineer stayed with the Fraunhofer Institute, a link between university researchers and companies.
``There was a time in 1998, '99 when I thought and did a little bit of checking (to see) if I was to do my own company, how much would I get,'' he said. ``In early 1999 it was a couple of tens of millions. But I would need a business plan where I was convinced and I was not convinced.''
With major software companies such as Microsoft (NasdaqNM:MSFT - news) paying licensing fees for MP3, Brandenburg says he is satisfied with his growing share of the royalties.
``My definition of rich is that within the bounds of what I think is reasonable to do I don't have to ask can I do that,'' he said. ``From that point of view I feel rich.''
He said he splurges on an occasional expensive meal with his wife while on vacation. He drives a Mercedes, albeit one of the automaker's most economical A-Series hatchbacks.
Fraunhofer did reward Brandenburg by letting him set up a new branch of the institute in Ilmenau, a town of 30,000 in ex-Communist east Germany. Today he spends his time as a manager, but just down the hall audio discoveries are coming into focus.
New compression techniques are ever in the works, including an MP7 for multimedia data that may allow more efficient searching through video, audio and text on the Internet. Copy protection techniques is another area of work.
In one room, a team has mounted 48 small speakers in a row as they seek to develop the intelligent stereo set of the future, one that may be able to reproduce sound as though musicians were actually playing in the room.
Another group is working on a stereo system with a vast memory of songs that will play back music after the user hums a few notes of the tune.
``I feel very successful. I'm relatively famous, certainly in this science area,'' he said, adding MP3 royalties were giving him a nice pay boost. ``It's already more than something I would expect from someone doing technical work.''
