Article: Rockin' the Boat : MP3's explosive growth is giving record companies a fight for their lives.(music from the Internet)

A year ago "mp3" was as arcane a term to most people as "WWW" was five years ago. Today everyone knows what ".com" means-and "MP3" is on the verge of that kind of recognition. Short for "MPEG-1, Layer 3," it denotes a compression technique that shrinks audio files to less than a tenth of their original size. Aspiring musicians use it to slap their tunes on the Internet for anyone to download; gearheads use it to transfer songs from their CDs onto their computers to make custom mixes. So far, so good. But last year, when people started posting hits from superstars like Madonna and Puff Daddy on the Web, where anyone could download them for free, the record companies went ...

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