Ten years ago this year the MP3 Player was born, and this summer marks its tenth birthday. The invention of the MP3 player has revolutionised the way we listen to music, and even the way we buy music; so much so that many high street stores are no longer selling music on CDs.

The MP3 player was born, of all places, in South Korea, when the company SaeHan first launched their player named the ‘MP Man’. The MP Man offered just 16 megabytes of storage space, which is very modest when compared to the massive 160 gigabytes on offer from the iPod classic, a massive 10,000 times more storage capacity.

That’s the nature of progress though, and it wasn’t until the Rio PMP 300 was introduced in autumn 1998 from the company Diamond Multimedia that the MP3 player market really took off.

It was ten years ago this summer that the Diamond Rio 300 made people realise just what was possible with the technology, packing a slightly more impressive 64 megabytes of storage space.

It’s incredible to think how far the market has come in just ten years.