Hey, it's Alan, and I just wanted to let you know that you can now listen to the ongoing

history of new music early and ad-free on Amazon music, included with Prime.

In 1994, a former fiber optic technician named Ricky Adar was given a presentation of some new

technology. Adar, who is British, had recently turned his attention toward the music industry.

He'd become besotted with this new thing called the Internet and believed it could be used to sell

and distribute music online. Again, this is 1994. The Internet had just opened for public use,

and not a lot of people were thinking about it yet, but Adar believed in his vision.

As he was looking everywhere for funding, he met Carl Heinz Brandenburg. He worked at the

Fraunhofer Society, a publicly owned research organization based in Germany, and he too had a vision.

But like Adar, nobody wanted to hear about

it. After years of work, Brandenberg and his people had developed a software algorithm that had been

chosen as the international standard for compressed audio on these newfangled things called

CD-ROMs. The technology was called ISO-MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3,

or eventually MP3 for short.

But few people seem to care about this new algorithm

outside of some very narrow applications.

But Adar got it right away.

Do you realize what you've done?

He asked Brandon Burke.

You've killed the music industry.

Brandenburg was taken aback.

That's not our intent.

...