Today, the music is touted to be one of the largest industries in the world accounting for nearly a billion dollar in revenues. Once known to be a dying industry in the 1990s with the fading popularity of the CD, technologies such as iTunes and the iPod helped revive the dying industry and has accounted for much of the industry's success in the past decade. One of the reasons that enabled the popularity of music and portable players like the iPod is the invent of the MP3 format. The popularity of this format can be clearly understood from the fact that there is no music player manufactured these days that do not contain an inbuilt music player. There are various reasons why most songs are preferred in this format.

One of the reasons is the truth that Mp3 songs generally take up quite a small memory space. Most of these songs range from just a few Kilobytes to a couple of Megabytes, and that too normally below eight for one normal size song. This considered extremely small than the other audio formats that take up several Megabytes for just one song. This means that a single CD with storage potential of 700 Mb can store more than one hundred and fifty tracks of this format than the traditional average of 14 songs only.

People may think that compressing audio files into Mp3 format generally impacts the quality of music and may deteriorate it. However, this is, in fact, one another stunning thing about such songs. Although, they are small but still have CD-equivalent quality. The fact that these songs require extremely small storage space and produce extremely high quality sound when played turned them the main music media on the web. That means that it is the key format in which music is sold and downloaded from the internet. This considered as another reason that makes Mp3 songs so popular. Getting music from the internet is the fastest, easiest and the most convenient form of obtaining favorite music tracks. Therefore, all those people who want to get rid of going to the music store and interested in downloading music straight from the internet, do not waste their time and just simply download these songs with the click of a mouse.

Another overarching idea of the popularity of the MP3 format is the fact that almost no player today is not compatible with it. It does not matter whether people want to play their songs in their mobile phone, walkman, iPod, car stereo etc. These songs can be comfortably played in any of these devices. All these features help in raising the popularity of the format.