1998

Diamond Rio MP3 Player

The Rio PMP300, a digital music player from Diamond Multimedia®, was introduced on September 15, 1998. The size of a deck of cards, it sold for $200 and held 32 megabytes of storage. Users could skip, shuffle, repeat, and randomly play tracks. It ran on one AA battery and could play for about 10 hours before needing a new battery or recharge. Music was transferred to it from a personal computer via a proprietary connector to the computer’s parallel port.

The real claim to fame of the Diamond Rio®, though, was the historic role it played in clearing the path for the establishment of a new digital music ecosystem, initially dominated by Apple’s iTunes and the iPod digital music player.

The Rio played music in a relatively new audio compression format called MP3. Created by German engineers, MP3 made possible widespread music sharing and spawned a new industry. Uncompressed, audio files take up a large amount of space—32 megabytes of storage could hold only a few minutes of music. The new format solved the practical challenge of storing and sharing music files by dramatically shrinking (compressing) the size of the file without a significant loss in sound quality: that same 32 megabytes could hold nearly an hour of music. Within a year, peer-to-peer music file-sharing services such as Napster® emerged, making it possible for people to freely share their digitized music with thousands of others over the internet, rapidly creating a cultural and legal environment that the music industry viewed as dangerous to its bottom line.

In 1999, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued Diamond Multimedia for creating a device that allegedly violated the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 (AHRA) because it did not implement a copyright management system. The RIAA claimed the company had not paid royalties required by law on the sales of the device—and as such, the RIAA alleged that the device was facilitating music piracy. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit eventually ruled in favor of the Rio in Recording Industry Association of America, Inc. v. Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc., based in part on the argument that computer users have the right to “space-shift” their lawfully acquired music files from one location to another, just as television viewers could “time-shift” shows that they recorded on video players for viewing later.

After the lawsuit, the Rio’s sales took off and the company launched RioPort, one of the first online music stores where users could legally purchase music.

SEE ALSO iTunes (2001)

The Diamond Rio PMP300 MP3 player, pictured here, offered users innovative new features, such as the ability to skip, shuffle, and randomly play tracks.