Florian Wesch, a computer science student from Durlach in Germany, has worked out a way to store a tune on the RFID tags attached to goods. To squeeze a jingle onto a tag’s 1-kilobyte memory, Wesch used the compressed music format employed by the Commodore 64 home computer of the 1980s. When the tag is scanned at the supermarket checkout, it would send the tune to be played by the tag reader.

Via the RFID weblog New Scientist.