Every Friday at Tamla Motown Records, Berry Gordy would hold a meeting that determined which batch of songs would get released and which would be sent back to the studio for a sonic upholstering.

Gordy so sculpted the "Motown Sound" that you can tell a Motown song from its first few bars. It's not just the omni- present use of tambourine and footsteps, but the distinctive melodic bass line and time- honoured chord structure that hardly ever vary.

The Motown singles remain the Gold Standard for popular music. Despite all the advances in record production, they still sound better than anything produced in today's studios.

The Boilerhouse Boys, a British production duo, believe that the Motown Sound has a vital role to play in today's music. Their theory was that by cracking the Motown production code, they could shine light on why today's MP3s sound so anaemic. By studying releases from the early day of stereo (including singles by The Beatles), they came up with a number of techniques that have helped them formulate an interesting concept.

"I started to investigate the Motown sound," says Boilerhouse Boy Ben Wolff, "and I found that the real power at Motown was with the lab coats. No record could be released without their approval, whether it was Smokey Robinson or Marvin Gaye. All of the Motown singles were sent up to the technical department, who would analyse it and send it back with recommendations on how to make it louder.

"As a result, when we were recording the song Give Me a Little More Time [a hit for Gabrielle in 1996], I followed religiously all the techniques I'd found from researching Motown's musical journey of technology. We had some vindication, in that it did sound different and it did sound louder, and the record did really, really well."

For Why, Gabrielle's current single, Wolff went even further and released a "poduction mix" (alongside the regular mix). This is designed to sound better on MP3 players. "I don't think the average fan will necessarily be able to tell the difference, but you'll know which one you like more, even if you don't know why."

Bands are reportedly queuing up to bring out poduction mixes, with Kaiser Chiefs next in line.

It's all very interesting, but it's all rubbish. "Poduction" doesn't really exist. It's just a fancy marketing term for boosting the higher frequencies on a song.

However, it is an attempt - unsuccessful I reckon - to address a real problem with digital music. If you buy music digitally or import it from a CD and then listen to it on headphones, you hear the same thing in each ear. This is in opposition to pre-digital music, where you heard different parts in each headphone.

For all it's "I can't believe it's not an MP3" hype, poduction fails to correct this anomaly (at least to my ears, as well as those of two random passers-by I accosted and begged to listen to Gabrielle).

The bigger problem is despite advances in technology, most music is still produced to be heard on CDs only. And even if more technical work could be done to improve the sound quality of MP3 files, there is commercial resistance to doing so. There exists an unacknowledged truth that the industry will not invest in better MP3 sound because they believe it would encourage illegal downloaders.