Thus, the digital music revolution began with the simplest kind of musical beauty. Brandenburg was enraptured with the sound of Vega’s unaccompanied voice, and thought his format had potential only if he could accurately reproduce that. A two-minute song like "Tom’s Diner" would be a scant three megabytes. This, however, was the first indication that you could compress a (nearly) CD-quality version of a song into a tiny bit of information that would take up minimal computer space. The MP3 hadn’t been named yet, and the idea of sharing or selling this piece of data was a long way away. That’s because "Tom’s Diner" was the very first song to be digitized when a German engineer, Karlheinz Brandenburg, unveiled a new audio compression tool in the early 90s, pointing towards the future of digital music. She may not think so herself, but Suzanne Vega just might be the most influential figure in the past three decades of music.
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