A closer look
German engineers at the Fraunhofer Institute invented the MP3 audio format in 1989, using the Suzanne Vega song "Tom's Diner" as the reference track to fine-tune the audio compression algorithm. They needed a song with a cappella vocals to test how well the software could shrink the file without making the human voice sound like it was echoing inside a tin can. Because of this random testing choice, Suzanne Vega officially became the mother of the MP3, indirectly paving the way for the total collapse of the physical music industry a decade later when Napster arrived. We owe the existence of our entire digital music ecosystem, every illegal early 2000s download that gave your family computer a catastrophic virus, to a bunch of European scientists obsessively listening to the exact same folk-pop track thousands of times in a sterile laboratory
