This piece will probably end up being very similar to other people’s opinion in our class; however, the thing that stuck out to me the most while reading Sterne’s book was the beginning of his second chapter when he talks about the cat telephone. It’s phenomenal that something so odd can turn out to be such a great breakthrough in psychoacoustic research. At the same time, piece of information that will stick with me for a long time is how the MP3 has actually impacted music listening experience for billions of people worldwide. Sterne says that “compression practices have created new kinds of aesthetic experiences that come to be pleasurable in themselves for some audiences” meaning he sees a cultural effect that has been brought upon by the creation of a different format of music sharing. The MP3 has had effects that possibly no one had seen coming while it was being created. It completely changed how people shared music, and allowed for a new extremely easy way for people to get the music they wanted for free (pirating). One aspect that Sterne did not touch on was the way the MP3 affected how important albums are. Even though songs are still released in groups called albums, there is much more emphasis placed on individual songs rather than an artists album as a whole. This is because with the ease of singling out specific songs people enjoy and putting them in a playlist, they no longer have to worry about the next song being the “song they don’t like” from the album. Along the same lines, the most popular method of listening to music today is by paying a subscription fee to listen to a service’s available music such as “Spotify” or “Pandora Radio.” Subscription based services have been around since eMusic’s breaking onto the scene in 1998 which allowed people to download a certain number of MP3 files to their MP3 Player per month just for paying the monthly fee. This is really only the surface of what the MP3 has done; It is really amazing how one file format totally changed everything about modern day music.