spirited defence of MP3 format

If it became so wildly popular while being proprietary, why on earth would releasing it into the public domain make it less popular? That just makes no sense at all.
 
There is only one argument for abandoning MP3, which is that the main reasons for its popularity no longer apply: limited network bandwidth and expensive storage. Did bacon fall from favor when with the advent of refrigeration removed the need for nitrites as a preservative?
 
I do not buy the alternative argument that MP3 will go away because other formats offer higher fidelity. I  don't buy it because less than 1% of music listeners do so through playback systems of high-enough quality to actually discern a difference. If your average music consumer repeats the "MP3s suck" mantra it's because they're parroting what they heard from YouTube commentators, not because they came to that conclusion themselves by listening to their iPhone earbuds.

I am somewhat less convinced of the "320 kb/s is indistinguishable from a CD" assumption today than I once was.
 
If I am intimately familiar with a piece of music, such as one of my own mixes, I actually can hear the difference between MP3 and FLAC, and prefer the latter. In a blind A/B/X test I got a 100% hit rate - but only with my own mixes. I cannot, however, distinguish between 320 kb/s MP3 and 256 kb/s AAC under any circumstance.
 
When I listen to the radio in my car I am listening to AAC-encoded files, as that is how content is distributed to radio stations. Do I notice? No. After technically-necessary bandwidth reduction and compression applied by broadcasters, the wildly varying frequency response and resonances of my car's sound system - all competing with road noise - any limitations of lossy encoding are microscopically trivial. If the broadcaster had instead used an MP3 or a CD, I'd be none the wiser.
 
The other time I listen to file-compressed audio is during my nightly routine: in the dark, in a quiet room, with high-quality headphones. Sometimes with herbal assistance. It's a mixture of ripped CDs (WMA) and purchased MP3/AAC files that are typically 256 kb/s or less. This should be very close to an ideal listening situation, but do I care which format I'm listening to? Nope.