There's a moment in the history of technology when everything changes. We don't always recognise it. Sometimes it takes years to understand that a small spark, an apparently insignificant detail, ignited a revolution that would forever change the way we live, communicate, and consume culture. In 1987, an American singer-songwriter named Suzanne Vega released a minimalist track called “Tom's Diner”. Two minutes and nine seconds of a cappella vocals, no instrumental accompaniment, no special effects. Just a voice telling the story of an ordinary morning in a New York diner. A song so essential, so pure in its simplicity, that someone on the other side of the world – a German engineer obsessed with #audio compression – would use it as a benchmark to create a technology that would shake the global music industry to its core. That technology was called #MP3. And that voice, that “warm a cappella voice” as Karlheinz Brandenburg would later describe it, would become the ultimate test to determine whether a compression algorithm actually worked or not.