“Tom’s Diner” is a song by Suzanne Vega; a restaurant in New York City; and a website that delves into the history of Vega’s song, including its mythical role in the development of the MP3, and the unprecedented ways that it has permeated pop culture since its release in 1984. First, let’s take a moment to listen to the song:

The diner that Vega describes in the song is actually called Tom’s Restaurant, which she would frequent when she was a student at Barnard College in the early 1980s. While much has changed in the neighborhood since then, Tom’s still sits on corner of 112th and Broadway and has become something of an institution on the Upper West Side. If you’re a fan of Seinfeld, you might recognize its facade, which features red neon signage and doubled as the exterior of Monk’s Cafe in the popular sitcom.

Vega was inspired by a photographer friend who once told her that he felt as though he saw the world through a pane of glass. In a 2008 blog post for the New York Times, she wrote, “This struck me as romantic and alienated, and I wanted to write a song from this viewpoint.” She imagined the song with piano in the background but didn’t know how to play the instrument, so she kept it a cappella. Later, during live shows, she discovered that it was an effective way to make audiences quiet down, and would often use it as an opening song.

Although Vega wrote “Tom’s Diner” in 1982, it was first released in January 1984 as part of the inaugural issue of Fast Folk Musical Magazine, which called itself “a desperately needed venue for the expansion of the concept of the noncommercial artistic song.” Three years later, Vega featured “Tom’s Diner” as the opening track on her critically acclaimed second album, Solitude Standing.

That album later found its way to the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in Erlangen, a town in the southern German state of Bavaria. An electrical engineer named Karlheinz Brandenburg was working on compressing audio files so that they could be transmitted over the new digital telephone lines that were being installed across Germany. Brandenburg had developed an algorithm that could eliminate the parts of a sound recording that were imperceptible to the average human ear, thereby reducing the size of the audio file.

At the Fraunhofer Institute, Brandenburg and his team of engineers were testing the algorithm on different types of music. It seemed to be working pretty well, until they encountered a dilemma in 1988. Here’s Brandenburg, in a 2015 interview with Brian McCullough on the Internet History Podcast:

Unlike most instruments, Vega’s warm vocals did not fare well when compressed by the algorithm:

With the help of “Tom’s Diner,” which they listened to hundreds of times, Brandenburg and his team were able to refine their algorithm, which became known as optimum coding in the frequency domain, or OCF. They submitted their technology to the Moving Picture Experts Group, or MPEG, which sets international standards for digital multimedia formats.

After intense politicking, a compromise was reached in 1992 wherein three standards for audio compression were adopted, and the Fraunhofer’s method was dubbed MPEG Audio Layer III. However, while Layers I and II were chosen as the compression standards for existing technologies, such as digital broadcasting, CD-ROMs, and DVDs, Layer III was not designated for any technology, causing it to languish for several years.

But then, along came the World Wide Web and Windows 95. Brandenburg and his team jumped at the opportunity to make their compression method the internet audio standard. On July 14, 1995, a researcher for the Fraunhofer Institute announced the results of a poll for a filename extension for MPEG Audio Layer III, and the MP3 was officially born.

To promote their invention, the Fraunhofer Institute developed and released MP3 players and decoding software as free-to-use shareware on the Internet, such as WinPlay3, and didn’t immediately go after freeware authors. By the late 1990s, the MP3 had become the de facto standard for digital audio, and the Fraunhofer was profiting handsomely from licensing fees. Here’s Brandenburg again, on the Internet History Podcast:

But like with any technology, there were unanticipated consequences:

Brandenburg tried to warn the music industry, but they didn’t listen, and the unprotected, pirated MP3 won out. But that’s a story for another day.

Let’s return to Suzanne Vega. One day in 2000, after dropping off her daughter at nursery school, she was approached by a father who congratulated her on being the “Mother of the MP3.” She had no idea what he was talking about. He told her about an article he had read describing how Karlheinz Brandenburg had fine-tuned his compression algorithm using “Tom’s Diner.” It was hyperbolically titled, “Ich Bin Ein Paradigm Shifter: The MP3 Format is a Product of Suzanne Vega’s Voice and This Man’s Ears.” Several years later, Vega was even invited to the Fraunhofer Institute, where Brandenburg and his team showed her how awful “Tom’s Diner” had sounded before they refined their algorithm.

However, one must keep in mind that the impact of “Tom’s Diner” has often been overstated, to the point of becoming musical lore. Other recordings were prominently used in MPEG listening tests, including Tracy Chapman’s “Mountains O’ Things” and Ornette Coleman’s “In All Languages,” and Brandenburg loathes being called the “Father of the MP3.” According to media scholar Jonathan Sterne, the lone-inventor-encounters-muse archetype “presses all the romantic buttons on the machine that makes histories of technology, and “like all urban legends, [it] has grown and mutated.” But this transmogrification also speaks volumes about our attitudes toward technology, male genius, and authorship, as well as our preference for simple answers.

This audiophilic foray was just one of the many surprising journeys that “Tom’s Diner” took upon its release. In 1990, two British electronic producers called DNA remixed the song and sold vinyl copies without obtaining permission from A&M, Vega’s record company. A&M eventually found out, but after consulting Vega, who was a big fan of the remix, the company decided to buy and release the remix itself instead of taking legal action. It quickly became a hit on the radio and in dance clubs, peaking at #2 on the UK Singles Chart and #5 on the US Billboard Hot 100 in 1990. When people talk about “Tom’s Diner,” they’re usually referring to the DNA remix instead of Vega’s original a cappella version. Let’s give it a spin:

“Tom’s Diner” was so appealing and irresistible that musicians from all kinds of genres would send Vega their own takes on it. She liked some of them so much that in 1991, she decided to release a compilation of remixes called Tom’s Album. One of her favorites was by a rapper named Nikki D, who turned the song into a rap about teenage pregnancy called “Daddy’s Little Girl”:

Another one of Vega’s favorites was a reggae interpretation by Michigan & Smiley, a Jamaican dancehall duo:

In her New York Times blog post, Vega described putting together the compilation album as a “logistical nightmare,” because she had to go back to the musicians who had taken her song without permission, and ask for their permission to use their version of her song on the album. Since then, dozens of more artists have reinterpreted “Tom’s Diner”— but since we can’t get to all of them, we’ll just listen to the more interesting ones.

In 1998, Some Treat released “Lost in Vegas,” which samples the melody of “Tom’s Diner” and became a UK Garage classic. Ten years later, a YouTube channel called “badboysouluk” uploaded it online; some of the comments include “98/99 style. if u know u know” and “As no1’s commented 4 over 2 yrs shows how little people knw about the ruthless tunes of the 90’s which were n still r legendary, fckin love this tune!!” As they say, never forget:

That same year, a Dutch Eurodance group called T-Spoon released “Tom’s Party,” which sounds like what would happen if Tom’s Diner was converted into Tom’s Discotheque:

Speaking of parties, in 2004, the rap duo Park Slope released “La Dee Da Dee (We Like 2 Party),” which featured The Hood$tars, a short-lived group that included Nicki Minaj, among others. The melody of “Tom’s Diner” is tucked into the song, recurring several times:

In 2007, the footwork producers DJ Rashad and DJ Spinn sampled Vega’s vocals in “Tekz Diner,” which has never been formally released and can be found only on YouTube. “Tekz” most likely refers to Teklife, a pioneering footwork crew that Rashad and Spinn co-founded in Chicago in the 1990s. “Tekz Diner” has all of the classic markers of footwork music: syncopated rhythms, repetitive sampling, and frenetic instrumentation:

Also in 2007, a posthumous compilation of 2Pac’s greatest hits was released. Included in Best of 2Pac, Part 2: Life was a previously unreleased song called “Dopefiend’s Diner,” in which 2Pac raps to the melody of “Tom’s Diner.” As you can probably gather from the title, the diner is very different from the one on 112th and Broadway, and it becomes the site of a terrible tragedy:

In 2009, before he gained his reputation as a prolific sampler, the rapper Drake released a mixtape called Heartbreak Drake 2. In a track called “Juice,” Drake raps over the melody of “Tom’s Diner,” but this time, the subject matter is his superiority:

In 2014, the quintessential emo band Fall Out Boy released their hit single “Centuries,” which samples Vega’s vocals and reached #10 on the US Billboard Hot 100 and #1 on the UK Rock and Metal Chart. We highly recommend checking out the official music video, which depicts a bracing gladiator tournament between a formidable combatant and the band’s four members:

It would be remiss not to mention Giorgio Moroder’s 2015 remake of “Tom’s Diner,” which features, of all people, Britney Spears on vocals. The official music video’s top comment on YouTube does an excellent job of clarifying the provenance of the song. Four years ago, Thura Fatale asked, “Why all of the people saying BRITNEY copied FALL OUT BOY’S Centuries?? The original version is from SUZANNE VEGA in 1987. Britney COVERED it. Fall out boy sampled it!” Thank you, Thura:

We’re going to end with Ghost in the MP3, a project by the artist and composer Ryan Maguire. In a song titled “moDernisT,” which is an anagram of “Tom’s Diner,” Maguire salvaged the sounds that were eliminated by the MP3 encoding process, resulting in haunting traces of the original song.

In a paper that Maguire published in the 2014 International Computer Music Conference Proceedings, he noted that the listening tests that refined the MP3 codec were “primarily designed by and for Western European men” using music that they liked, and that these tests “determined which sounds were perceptually important and which could be erased or altered, ostensibly without being noticed.” With his project, Maguire wanted to investigate these lost sounds, as well as the aesthetic possibilities intrinsic to the MP3 format.

We hope you enjoyed this wild ride through the past three-and-a-half decades of sonic culture. It’s astounding how much history can be woven into just one song, tracking the rise of both new technologies and new genres. Why “Tom’s Diner,” you might ask? It probably goes back to the melody, which hit Suzanne Vega as she was walking down Broadway when she was 22 years old. No matter who you are, it worms its way into your ears and refuses to leave. The story of “Tom’s Diner” is still being written; many more renditions will surely appear. Here is Ryan Maguire’s, from 2014: