As introduced by 19-year-old inventor Shawn Fanning, its logic was fiendishly simple: the app allowed its users to raid each other’s digital music libraries, browsing collections and picking and choosing what they wanted to copy from them.

Most of us remember Napster as something akin to Playboy magazine: an illicit thing that your friends told you about. But, of course, digital music entered the black market first, through a downloadable file-sharing app that hit the web in June 1999: that notorious entity known as Napster. Apple launched iTunes and its portable device, the iPod, in 2001, marking the moment when digital music truly entered the marketplace. Though the MP3 was in the works as early as 1995, the two most game-changing events in digital music took place at the turn of the millennium. Even in the 90s, the idea of fitting every album you owned on a pocket-sized portable device was straight out of The Jetsons. The advent of digital music did more than reinvent the music industry, it forced music fans and collectors to forget everything they knew about music ownership – where their collection lives, what form it takes and how to access it. The advent of digital musicīy now it’s hard to remember a time when you only owned an album if you could hold the physical copy. 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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