This is an idea I’ve been toying with for a bit. There is a ton of media that includes unimportant information that doesn’t need to be stored pixel perfect. Storing large portions of the image data as text will save substantial amounts of storage, and as the reality of on-device image generation becoming commonplace sets in digital memories will become the main way people capture the world around them. I think this will inevitably be the next form of media capture (photography and video), not replacing other methods/ formats, but I could see things like phone cameras having saving images as digital memories set to default to save on storage.
I think the music version would be MIDI.
No, just, no.
MIDI is awesome in some ways, but I would never replace an actual recording of an instrumental song with a midi file.
The midi is too denpentant on the decoder, and won’t replicate the sound accurately.