It may be king but it's not perfect, since it uses lossy compression to store the data, which generates artifacts that are noticeable when listening to MP3 music on a quality sound system. As memory becomes cheaper I would think there would be more use of one of the lossless compression schemes, such as FLAC. That gives you CD quality at about half the storage requirement of a CD (wav file).Now MP3 is king of the formats and I don't see how it can be beaten.