Did You Know

Usher’s “OMG” sounds a lot like a song Homer Simpson wrote in 2003. 

DJ's from Y101.7, a radio station in Jackson, Mississippi, discovered the similarities earlier this year. If you listen to the two songs together, it's pretty hilarious. 

CDs were designed to hold 74 minutes of music because that’s the length of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. 
When designing the compact disc, the engineers at Philips originally based their work on the playing time of an hour, which meant that all existing albums could potentially fit (double-sided LPs were a few minutes short of an hour). However, Sony vice-president Norio Ohga, who was responsible for the project and had studied at the Conservatory in Berlin, did not agree. During his time at the conservatory, Ohga had grown quite fond of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. 
A performance of the Ninth by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Herbert von Karajan, lasted for 66 minutes and would not fit on their protypical CD. The other engineers agreed that a few extra minutes of space could be spared. To be safe, they also checked all other known recordings of the symphony with PolyGram, a Philips subsidiary. The longest known performance was recorded during the Bayreuther Festspiele in 1951 and conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler. The 74-minute running time of this rendition therefore became the industry standard for compact discs and only added half a centimeter to the diameter of the previous model!