Much has been said about the shift from physical media to a ubiquitous digital culture. Some denounce the decline of vinyl records, the decline in sales of compact discs, the depreciation and degradation of an art form. I will try to stay away from unverifiable judgments about the direction modern culture is moving. More interesting is how music creation is changing as a result of new technologies, whether we like it or not. What comes to mind is hyperreality – what Jean Baudrillard called “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality” (166). Digital representations, originally intended to recreate the original sound waves of music, are losing their point of origin and becoming musical works themselves. Technological developments in the 21st century have given us profoundly new ways of interacting with and perceiving representations. Hyperreality is becoming increasingly pervasive in society, present in almost every area of ​​daily life. The distinction between original and copy is rapidly fading, as culture becomes a densely interconnected hypertext of information. Here I will explore how digital music has changed the way we listen and, more specifically, how the mash-up genre embodies advancing hyperreality. Before we explore the realm of digital music, we need to return to what enables the transition to hyperreality. future: digital computers. Computers allow information in the physical world to be broken down into discrete blocks and stored as a representation in digital memory. Digital memory stores information as a series of bits (the fundamental unit of information - a choice between 2 distinct possibilities), encoded in a series of transistors. This act of abstraction is very powerful, as all… middle of paper… er, a penetration into global culture, a pervasiveness like no other century has experienced. Very few people today would question the concept of transmitting emotions across thousands of miles encoded in a series of ones and zeros, but this must once have seemed like an absurd idea. The levels of abstraction enabled by digital computing have irreversibly changed the world of music and given rise to new forms of creation. Works Cited Baudrillard, Jean. Selected writings. Ed. Marco Manifesto. Stanford: Stanford University, 1988. Print.Eco, Umberto. Travel in hyperreality. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. Print.Butler, Mark J. Unlocking the Groove. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Print "Sampling (music)" Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. October 17, 2011. Network. October 11. 2011.