Some even question whether the current model of music distribution will exist in a few years. MP3 is getting all the attention, but it's not the whole story. Music has been on the Internet in various formats since the commercialisation of the Web, but it has posed a problem in terms of file size. While animation and high-quality graphics can take up space and slow down a site, it's easy to skim a little off the quality to cut down size and still find an impressive compromise. Compression, the key to delivering any kind of multimedia to the bandwidth-starved Net, is easier to impose on graphics than sound as it relies on the repetition of minute details.
Music is a trickier medium.
First, the analogue signal has to be converted into digital, stored on the chip, then reconverted into analogue. One way of getting round this is Midi, a set of instructions to the sound card which digitally reproduce the song in a similar way to playing a basic synthesiser. Midi still exists, but its synthesised output now sounds tinny and out of place in the MP3 and streaming audio era. WAV files are, on the other hand, capable of producing CD-quality sounds. This Microsoft-developed PCM standard provides the clips that make for the sound element in many sites.