Abstract: The increasing requirements of multimedia applications caused MPEG series to go far beyond a kind of A/V codec technique The development of MPEG audio standard is analyzed based on the point of view of layered information application This process can be divided into three main procedures: feature representation, content description and interoperability Although there are more and more new requirements and new aims coming from the practical applications, researchers can also find that in a foreseeable future, many attentions should still be concentrated on improving the efficiency of audio coding and on mining more precise content based description methods Possible problems of existing standards are pointed out and a brief description of the perspectives of MPEG audio is also presented