One of the most significant developments in the history of digital music is the creation and adoption of a specific digital file format that enabled the easy transmission of tunes over the internet.
Its official name is the unwieldy Motion Picture Experts Group, Layer-3, which can be shortened down to MPEG-3. But even that was too long for technical reasons.
The file system used by Microsoft Windows used a naming convention where the file extension had to be “dot” followed by three characters. If this new digital format was going to be usable on Microsoft computers, it had to follow Microsoft rules. That’s how Motion Picture Experts Group, Layer-3 became just .mp3.
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