The MP3 player has been with us for ten years now, and it’s become an integral part of our pop culture. We use it when we ride our bike, go to the gym, sit on the bus, type on the computer and whenever we want to drown out the world around us. It’s as if we’ve never been without the little box that single handedly killed off personal stereos, personal CD players and mini-disc players.

It almost never happened though. The MP3 player was very nearly stopped in its tracks before it even got started, and it was the player’s versatility that almost proved its downfall.

California based company Diamond released the Rio PMP300 in 1998. It featured 32MB of storage and was the first MP3 player released in the United States that was manufactured by a company with a US office.

This is where it all so very nearly went wrong.

The Recording Industry Association of America saw the device as a direct threat to the whole music industry. They applied for a restraining order barring sale of the device in the US, claiming that it contravened the Home Recording Act from 1992, because owners of the device would be able to copy music from one format to another. Incredibly a US court granted a temporary order, blocking the sale of the Rio.

They did however retract the order after they had decided that Diamond could not be held responsible for the actions of consumers who bought their MP3 player.

Once this ruling had been made, the MP3 player market exploded in the US. Accompanied by the fact that people were going online very quickly in America, file sharing sites sprang up to feed the MP3 player owner’s market.

Music sharing on a grand scale was born.

Then came Apple, and in 2001 the iPod took the market on to the next level.