MP3 Players By Katappel1 1987 MP3 Player was originally developed. 1989 Fraunhofer received a German patent for MP3. 1992 Fraunhofer's and Dieter Seitzer's audio coding algorithm was integrated into MPEG-1. 1993 MPEG-1 standard was published. 1994 MPEG-2 was developed and published a year later. Nov 26, 1994 United States patent for MP3 was issued. 1998 A record company called SubPop was the first to distribute music tracks in the MP3 format. 1999 Portable MP3 players make their debut. 2000 Flash memory cost a hefty $3 to $4 per MB (or about $3500 per gigabyte).