Important Dates:
- 1987 - The Fraunhofer Institut in Germany began research code-named EUREKA project EU147, Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB).
- January 1988 - MPEG was established as a subcommittee of the International Standards Organization/International Electrotechnical Commission or ISO/IEC.
- April 1989 - Fraunhofer received a German patent for MP3.
- 1992 - Fraunhofer's and Dieter Seitzer’s audio coding algorithm was integrated into MPEG-1.
- 1993 - MPEG-1 standard published.
- 1994 - MPEG-2 developed and published a year later.
- November 26, 1996 - US patent issued for MP3.
- In September 1998, Fraunhofer started to enforce their patent rights. All developers of MP3 encoders or rippers and decoders/players now have to pay a licensing fee to Fraunhofer.
- In February 1999, SubPop was the first company who distribute music tracks in the MP3 format.
