Early MP3 Players

The very first portable MP3 player, Eiger Labs' MPMan, shipped in early 1998, but Diamond Multimedia's Rio PMP300 in September 1998 was the device people actually bought. At $200, the size of a deck of cards, it held 32 MB of audio — roughly thirty minutes of music at 128 kbit/s, call it eight to ten songs — and ran for 8–12 hours on a single AA battery. It loaded music over a parallel-port cable connection to your PC, and because it had no moving parts, it never skipped — an enormous advantage over the Walkman and Discman legacy that had defined portable music for decades.

The RIAA attacked immediately. In October 1998, the music industry sued Diamond, claiming the Rio violated the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA), and a temporary restraining order briefly issued mid-October before the court denied it on October 26. The battle played out in the appeals court in 1999, which ruled that "space shifting" — copying music you own from one format to another for personal use — was fair use. The verdict legalized the entire category and cleared the runway for all the MP3 players that followed, most crucially the iPod. The Rio sold roughly 200,000 units on the back of the lawsuit publicity and the freedom it represented.

Rivals piled in between 1999 and 2001 — Sensory Science's RaveMP line, iriver, RCA's Lyra and others — with 64 MB models doubling capacity and memory-card slots stretching it further, all of it fed by Napster folders and Winamp playlists. Then the iPod arrived in October 2001 with a 5 GB hard drive — a thousand songs in your pocket — and within a few years the flash-brick era was over. What lingers is the ceremony it forced: deciding, every single morning, which eight songs deserved to leave the house with you.