Tom's Diner was picked by Karlheinz Brandenburg as the reference song to develop the MP3 format. The team developing the audio compression algorithms listened to it over and over until it sounded "good".
Although it's covered in the article, I wanted to add a little more context for folks who aren't familiar with the song:
* The song Tom's Diner was a notorious earworm that seemed to get stuck in the head of society at large for a few months in the early 90's. For a short while it felt like some version of it was playing on every radio everywhere
* The original track was minimal – just her voice – so lent itself to a wide variety of covers and remixes that crossed a lot of genres
* Suzanne Vega was an advocate for those covers and remixes at a time when the record industry was not, and eventually put together a full album of remixes called Tom's Album
Tom's Album has a lot of interesting tracks on it, including one refocused around the television series I Dream of Jeannie, called "Jeannie's Diner," by the man who would eventually be Richard Cheese, parodyist extraordinaire.
