President of Broadcast.com Mark Cuban needed a good soundbite for the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, and he found one. MP3 will die. I’m sure of that, he told the assembled new media types. It will be absorbed by RealNetworks or Microsoft and it’ll become just a notation. Given a year or so, RealNetworks will become an acquisition target in its turn, Cuban said. It could be a telco, it could be AOL, it could be Broadcast.com, he hazarded, in twelve months, who knows?
When a fan of the people’s audio format protested that IBM and many artists strongly support MP3 and the culture that has grown up around it, Cuban fired back: So what? Disco also used to have a strong culture. With his company based on streaming media, it’s hardly surprising that Cuban would favor that format over MP3. He did point out, however, that MP3 files are similar in size to streaming media files, and that most audience members can’t perceive the difference in quality.
