Datasets:

kkboy1

/

LeAudio

like 0

was to find an application which was compelling enough to encourage more people to use it

back in the year bluetooth technology was announced the music streaming services we

know today like spotify and apple music were still ten years away ironically subscription

based music streaming wasnt an unknown concept it was over a century old as far back

as so me telephone networks ran a service allowing you to listen remotely to live opera

but that concept had been trumped by a better organi sed industry model the arrival of

physical media in the form of wax discs and records which you could buy and listen to

when ever you wanted killed that original streaming concept having discovered that they

could own the artists the recording industry spent the next hundred years doing everything

they could to tighten copyright laws around the world to protect their stranglehold on how we

listened to music it was going to prove to be a long dominance in we still bought our

music in the form of physical recordings lps had been almost totally replaced by cds but

around of all the recorded music that we b ought that year still came on cassette then

things changed thanks largely to the separate efforts of the fraunhofer institute for integrated

circuits iis in germany and a small californian startup called napster

the fraunhofer iis is part of a wider research organisation and a centre of excellence in

developing audio codecs software that compresses audio files so that they are small enough

to be wirelessly transmitted or stored as digital files in they developed a new audio

codec for the international mpeg video compression standard it was particularly efficient

section the hearing aid legacy

compared to other audio cod ing schemes such as the one used for cds and quickly became

the standard for audio files transmitted over the internet it became known as mp with out

it we would have had to wait a lot longer for downloadable music

instead t he early s became the era of mp players and free downloadable music napster

burst onto the scene in and created the first real disruption t hat the recorded music

industry had faced in its hundred year existence they immediately took napster to court for

copyright infringement as well as trying to prosecute individual users for downloading music

consumers voted with their fingers repeatedly clicking download buttons to get hold of more

music for the first time music that you could listen to when ever you wanted was free by

just a year after it burst onto the market most of its users probably had more

downloaded songs on their pcs than they had physical albums however the recording

companies turned out to have the better lawyers and napster lost the initial attempt to make

music free had failed while the battle to kill off napster had been dragging through the

courts the ne xt stage of competition had already arrived in the form of apples itunes it

wasnt free but it was easy to use subscribers flocked to the new offering six months later

it became even easier with the launch of the first ipod

most of the engineers working on bluetooth technology were likely to have been napster and

itunes subscribers not least to have something to listen to on long haul flights to standards

meetings by the time the courts had decided napsters fate work was already underway to

add music streaming to bluetooth in the form of the advanced audio distribution profile

better known as adp despite its far from understandable moniker it was to become the

most successful of all bluetooth profile specifications and cement bluetooth technologys

place as the standard for wireless audio

adp along with its supporting specifications was adopted in companies like nokia

who had been heavily involved in its development expected it to be an instant success but it

proved to be slo w in taking off consumers didnt see the advantage in buying an expensive

wireless set of headphones with most using the free corded earbuds which came with every

handset despite the ir often limited audio quality much to the industrys surprise the initial

growth came not from headphones but from bluetooth speakers th at initial mobile music

market was one where you took your music with you but didnt necessarily play it while you

were mobile speakers grew into soundbars as tvs began to include adp but the

headphone market remained remarkably resi stant to growth until a new service appeared

spotify

spotify and its us precursor pandora introduced a new business model you could once

again listen to music for free as long as you accepte d advertisements if you didnt want the

interruptions that was fine you could get rid of them by paying a subscription it neatly

solved the copyright problem by generati ng revenue to pay licence fees regardless of whether

users took the subscriptio n or the ad supported route it effectively replicated what napster

had done but found a way to do it legally it helped that spotifys launch coincided with the

chapter the background and heritage

first iphone where consumers began to realise that smartphones wouldnt be used

predominantly for phone calls instead theyd spend most of their lives doing other stuff

especially as their appearance coincided with the advent of affordable mobile data plans wh ich

offered unlimited data usage mobile operators were quick to bundle spotify with their phone

contracts and users signed up most importantly it was easy to use itunes was still a service

where you bought a download and had to make a decis ion to play it with spotify you pressed

a button and music appeared it could be your own playlist or that of a music blogger a

favourite dj or an algorithm its great attraction was that it was frictionless you pressed a

button and music came out of your earbuds until you stopped it you no longer needed to

hold your phone you could keep in it you r pocket or bag which made it ideal for listening on

the move

at the point that you dont need to hold your phone an earbud cable becomes a nuisanc e it

was the nudge users needed to persuade them to start buying bluetooth headphones branded

bluetooth headphones sales started to rise as manufacturers saw customers cut the cable by

bluetooth headphones were outselling wired ones

figure the transition from wired to bluetooth headphones

figure shows how much the spotify experience helped drive that change over the ten

years since when spotify and the adp specification independently appeared on the

market the growth in blue tooth headphones has almost exactly tracked that of spotify

subscribers

section the hearing aid legacy

figure the growth of spotify subscriptions and bluetooth headphones

the growth in chip sales for wireless headphones drove innovation by bluetooth

silicon companies were shipping over billion chips per year and were looking for more

ways to differentiate their products the new bluetooth low energy standard had just

launched but it w ouldnt be until the end of that it appeared in the iphone s and several

more years before a new generation of wristbands started to use it in the interim cambridge

silicon radio csr who were subsequently acquired by qualcomm had become the l eading

player in chips for bluetooth audio devices and were looking at how they might extend the

functionality of the bluetooth audio profiles

why would they want to do that the problem they saw was that b oth of the two main

bluetooth audio standards were written for very specific use cases which hadnt anticipate d

the future the result of that is that they behave very differently hfp concentrates on low

latency bidirectional mono voice transmission whereas adp supports high quality m usic

streaming to a single device with no return audio path neither of those profiles were easily

extensible which limited what you could do with them csr were trying to push the

boundaries of wireless audio they had already been successful in devel oping a more efficient

codec tha n the sbc codec mandated by the bluetooth specifications adding their own