Is there a way to count the number of unique possible songs able to be created?

Question

As in the number of permutations of musical notes, lyrics (all known languages), and so on?

I am no mathematician or musician so this might (probably) be totally stupid. Any ideas would be interesting to hear though.

Answer 1

Any melody can be decently encoded at $128$ kbps, or $1$ MB per minute. Four minutes equals $4$ MB. So the total number of songs no longer than about $4$ minutes in length is lesser than $2^{~4~\cdot~8~\cdot~10^6}$

Answer 2

At least on a cd its possible. A digital song (not .mid song) is made out of samples.

A cd has a samplerate of 44100hz, this means 44100 samples per second (a sample has a length of 1/44100 seconds). A cd can't be true mono, so it will have one sample for the left channel and one sample for the right channel.

Each sample is a integer value from 32768 a +32767, or 65536 different values.

The cd can have at max 99 songs and each song must have at min 4 seconds.

The max amount of time a cd can hold is 79 minutes and 50 seconds.

Just assuming you make cd with a single song that fill the entire cd, the amount of cds you can make are 65536^422478000