Pop songs compressed by the Lempel-Ziv algorithm

Lempel-Ziv is a lossless compression algorithm. PNG, GIF, and gzip are all powered by variants of Lempel-Ziv. The algorithm works by exploiting repeated sequences of characters (or bytes). Pop songs happen to have lots of these, so LZ compresses them very efficiently.

For more context, and a brief explanation of Lempel-Ziv compression, check out my essay on Measuring repetitiveness of song lyrics.

Technical details