Why Tom's Dinner? Because it is a cappella. There's a book "How Music Got Free" by Stephen Witt [1] detailing the history of mp3 format and related events. It is a very good read and there's an explanation<p><i>Increases in processing power spurred progress. Within a year Brandenburg’s algorithm was handling a wide variety of recorded music... But one audio source was proving intractable: what Grill, with his imperfect command of English, called “the lonely voice.” (He meant “lone.”) Human speech could not, in isolation, be psychoacoustically masked. Nor could you use Huffman’s pattern recognition approach—the essence of speech was its dynamic nature, its plosives and sibilants and glottal stops. Brandenburg’s shrinking algorithm could handle symphonies, guitar solos, cannons, even “Oye Mi Canto,” but it still couldn’t handle a newscast.
Stuck, Brandenburg isolated samples of “lonely” voices. The first was a recording of a difficult German dialect that had plagued audio engineers for years. The second was a snippet of Suzanne Vega singing the opening bars of “Tom’s Diner,” her 1987 radio hit.</i><p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Music_Got_Free" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Music_Got_Free</a>