Entertainment Media Relations: MP3 Association

The MP3 phenomenon emerged on college campuses with students celebrating newly discovered technologies for digitizing and sharing music on the Internet. By 1998, hundreds of rogue Web sites were serving up thousands of songs to the delight of music fans around the world.

Virtually ignored by the press and facing intense market competition, the top five emerging companies in the MP3 industry retained Neil Vineberg to explain the MP3 story, introduce its major players and devise a media strategy to win acceptance and adoption of the technology.

Vineberg launched “Brace Yourself for the Battle Over MP3” at the first MP3 Summit organized by Michael Robertson’s Z Company (later renamed MP3.com), swelling a grass-roots movement supporting this new technology.

Barely six months later and based on the campaign’s phenomenal press coverage, MP3 became the dominant Internet music distribution technology, according to Web Noize. MP3 was also named one of the top five technology stories of the year by CBS News.