Quote:
Research into digital recording began in the early 1970s. In 1978 the Sony Corporation introduced the use of videotape recorders to store the digital data of recorded sound and video. Digital editing systems also were developed that year. Sony and Philips Electronics NV agreed on a compact disc (CD) format in 1981, and in 1983 CD playback technology was introduced.
Downloading music from the Internet became possible during the 1990s. By the end of the decade Internet users could download music using a variety of software programs available free of charge on the World Wide Web. Many of these programs, such as MP3 (short for Motion Picture Experts Group 1, Audio Layer 3), also made it easy for a user to copy songs from an album on compact disc to a computer's hard drive. The copied song could then be linked to a Web page, enabling people around the world to make illegal copies. Legal and illegal copies could be played back on home computers or downloaded to portable MP3 playback devices. In 1999 more than 100 record companies and other groups involved in the recording and electronics industries joined forces to prevent recorded music from being illegally copied and distributed on the Internet.
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they have been available for a long time, just recently, things like portable mp3 players made them more desirable