The roll-out of AAC (which was designed to address the problems with MP3, but was not backwards compatible) was slowed a bit by expensive licensing fees for hardware manufacturers and the lack of a good free encoder (though there were some very poor implementations)...
By the time this was sorted MP3 had gained massive popularity on "teh scene" and was soon followed by napster etc - the rest is history, so yes it's all about the "brand recognition" now sadly.
Most people could have a better sounding music collection in about half the size required for MP3 safely... still at least disk space is cheap these days.
The unfixable problem of MP3s "shortest allowable blocksize" causing audible smearing on transients will be with us until the format is abandoned, but I won't hold my breath.
These days for the best quality lossy audio you want AAC-LC encoded with either Apples encoder or the open source FDK-AAC by Fraunhofer (developed for Android) but fully cross platform... or Opus for a completely free and open codec , but still not yet as widely compatible.
By the time this was sorted MP3 had gained massive popularity on "teh scene" and was soon followed by napster etc - the rest is history, so yes it's all about the "brand recognition" now sadly.
Most people could have a better sounding music collection in about half the size required for MP3 safely... still at least disk space is cheap these days.
The unfixable problem of MP3s "shortest allowable blocksize" causing audible smearing on transients will be with us until the format is abandoned, but I won't hold my breath.
These days for the best quality lossy audio you want AAC-LC encoded with either Apples encoder or the open source FDK-AAC by Fraunhofer (developed for Android) but fully cross platform... or Opus for a completely free and open codec , but still not yet as widely compatible.