All things in music change, from the most popular style, to the way music is collected and listened to. Once home music had with the vinyl LP album. Then, people bought eight-tracks to take in the car. The eight-track evolved into cassettes, then cassettes became outdated as the industry entered the digital age with the invention of the compact disc. Now the music distribution circuit has taken another turn. This turn took the industry to another new medium, the Internet, where music distribution is dominated by the presence of MP3.

MP3 is a format for compressing digital music found on CDs. A three-minute song on a CD would take about 32 megabytes (MB). The same song compressed into MP3 format occupies only 3 MB. Amazingly, this tenfold compression is done without diminishing quality.

MP3 files can be obtained in a number of ways. One is to convert a digital music file from a CD into MP3 format. The process is called ripping and encoding. Ripping is copying the song from the CD: encoding is compressing the digital song into MP3 format. Many newer computers come equipped with the necessary software; others users can purchase it.

The most common way to obtain MP3 music is over the Internet. Though many sites allow download of music, the big player in the field is Kazaa. The Kazaa Media Desktop is software that allows for MP3 exchange between other Kazaa users. MP3 files are traded peer-to-peer, but not through Kazaa itself; they simply provide the necessary software.

Songs in MP3 format can be listened to directly on the computer, or they can be burnt onto a blank CD-R. MP3 files can also be transferred to a small, portable MP3 player. These players have different memory ranges, from 32 MB to 128 MB. For each 32 MB of memory, the player can hold an hour of music.

Tom Kisha, an electronics employee at Best Buy, explained the advantages of the MP3.

"With MP3s you get more bounce for the ounce," he said. "You get the same quality of music as you do with CDs, but they take up less space."

Kisha also explained how the MP3 is more versatile.

"MP3s are really flexible," he said. "You can record things like speeches at a low quality to save space, or you can record your songs at a high quality. You can do both with diminishing the quality of what you are trying to record."

The unique thing about the MP3 trend is that it was not started by the music industry, but by a group of listeners exchanging songs over the Internet. From these modest roots, the MP3 trading world has expanded over the nation and the world.