Despite the fact that the MP3 format was defined in 1992, it is still the most popular today and its performances are not far from those of other more recent formats (Vorbis, WMA, AAC, etc.).
Its success exploded in 1995, when the first Internet users could download MP3 files without recognizing the rights of the record companies. At that time the market met the needs of these users who wanted to be able to read these files even away from the PC, so the first portable MP3 players appeared.
Subsequently, the first official MP3 stores appeared on the Internet, where record rights were finally recognized.
MP3 is a lossy format, i.e. with lossy data compression (for example, the Zip is lossless), where the audio file once compressed and decompressed will never be the same as the original.
In any case, the loss is almost imperceptible to human hearing, especially if decompression occurs at 128Kbit/s and is completely imperceptible at 256Kbit/s.