A problem quickly emerged: the MP3 standard included no provision for
metadata; no way to “tag” an .mp3 file with information such
as title, artist, et cetera. NamkraD (AKA Eric Kemp) is credited with
the idea of attaching such a tag to .mp3 files in
1996. Presumably to make it easy to detect & parse, while not
interfering with existing decoders, it had a fixed size of one hundred
twenty-eight bytes, and was attached to the end of the file (if a
player that was unaware of the tag played the enclosing file, at worst
the user would hear a bit of static at the end). It provided for a
thirty-byte title, artist & album along with year, comment & a
one-byte genre field. The original proposal defined eighty genres,
extended to 148 by 1.91 release of Winamp (See Winamp.) in June 1998
and to 192 by the 5.6 release of Winamp in November 2010.
The limitations of this format quickly became aparent, leading to the proposal in 1998 of ID3v2 by Martin Nilsson and several other contributors. Although it shared a name, ID3v2 was a completely different approach to tagging music: it was prepended to the audio data (making it suitable for streaming media) and it was variable-length; ID3v2 tags are comprised of multiple frames, each containing one piece of information about the music (title, artist &c).