Chapter 2: Trends Towards Mobility 41 on-the-go editing of the playlists. The technologically inclined consum- ers were endlessly debating whether the ATRAC compression coding, used to fi t an hour of music to a small Minidisc, deteriorated the sound quality too much when compared to a CD. However, in some areas, Japan for instance, Minidiscs were rather popular. The most popular music compression method so far, the MP3 (more precisely: MPEG-1 layer 3), surfaced from the Fraunhofer laboratories in 1992 and 1993 when the coding algorithm was integrated into MPEG-1, and the MPEG-1 standard was published, respectively. It allowed compressing digital music to 10%–15% of the original data size on a CD, with only minor effects on sound quality. As a result, it became practical to distribute music over the (then) speed-limited Internet, which had meanwhile been spreading like wildfi re over the globe. First, technically advanced users would rip songs from CDs for listening on their computers and for sharing with friends on the Inter- net. Later, mobile players based on digital memory allowed enjoying the MP3 fi les on the road. MP3 players allowed users a great degree of control over the song order. The collections of songs had become known as playlists, which are a new form of personal content. The MP3 fi les not only include music but also metadata relating to it in the form of ID3 tags (section 4.6). The tags typically detail the song name, artist, album name, pub- lication year, and other data. This metadata facilitates digital manage- ment of the music fi les. Today, ID3 tags are the fundamental method for searching and sorting MP3 music. More fundamentally, MP3 came to represent to the digital genera- tion the same freedom as the C-cassette had represented to the ana- logue generation. It allowed people to take control of their music (and friends’ music too). It brought back the power of home-brew music compilations and playlists that the fi xed CD format had 26 suppressed. By the turn of the century, there had appeared numerous Internet sites for sharing digital music, many of them illegal. For instance, MP3. com and Napster allowed uploading and downloading of commercial music for free. Peer-to-peer (P2P) fi le sharing networks (such as Kazaa) allowed effi cient distribution of music fi les from the users’ computers. For some users, P2P networks became a primary channel for obtaining music. More recently, lawsuits have been posed against music sharing sites, and new legitimate commercial online music sites have appeared. 26 Let us also remember that much of the world is still not thoroughly infested with MP3 players and PCs. The C-cassette is still a very viable format in many parts of the world, for instance in India, Asia, and Africa.