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In an effort to move their businesses into cyberspace, record labels and audio content distributors are still experimenting with their online formulas. Key to the new economic models for selling music over the Net is this question: Would you rather pay a monthly subscription fee to download music, or pay for music track by track? According to market researcher <A HREF="http://gartner11.gartnerweb.com/public/static/home/home.html">Gartner Group</A>, sites that plan to sell music via the subscription model should seriously reconsider.

Chicago's Maxwell Street district is considered by many to be the birthplace of Chicago blues. But the old neighborhood is in danger of permanently losing some of its historic buildings, thanks to expansion plans by the <A HREF="http://www.uic.edu/">University of Illinois at Chicago</A>. The potential loss of the neighborhood has sparked protests by a coalition of blues musicians, including a hunger strike by 69-year-old <A HREF="http://www.acousticsounds.com/">APO Records</A> artist Jimmie Lee Robinson.

Audiophiles aren't taking to the streets just yet, but John Atkinson is more than a little riled about the proposed watermarking of SACD and DVD-Audio recordings. In this month's "As We See It," "<A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//asweseeit/257/">Watermarking: the Devil's Work!</A>," JA exhorts the audiophile masses to rise up in protest.

Andy Payor hurls a briefcase full of engineering and scientific mumbo-jumbo at in an attempt to justify the $73,750 price of the latest and greatest edition of his Rockport Technologies turntable, but really&mdash;isn't this all-air-driven design a case of analog overkill? After all, defining a turntable's job seems rather easy: rotate the record at an exact and constant speed, and, for a linear tracker, put the stylus in play across the record surface so that it maintains precise tangency to a radius described across the groove surface. By definition, a pivoted arm can't do that, so the goal there is to minimize the deviation. That's basically it. Right?

Reader Sean Stewart reports that every time he goes to Hudson's in Albuquerque and watches their lights flicker while driving their Nautilus 801s, he wonders about what audiophiles do to customize their AC supplies to improve performance.

When a manufacturer makes extraordinary claims about a product, the result is sometimes an extraordinary review. That's what happened when Jonathan Scull examined the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//accessoryreviews/255/">Richard Gray's Power Company 400S AC line conditioner</A> last June. His report raised a chorus of reader and industry reactions, all of them included here along with some additional unpublished observations.

After a May 10 <A HREF="http://stereophile.com/news/10744/"&gt; announcement</A> from the Federal Trade Commission that it had negotiated a settlement with the music industry's "Big Five" over a controversial pricing policy, enterprising private attorneys wasted little time initiating class-action lawsuits (<A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10750/">1</A&gt;, <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10803/">2</A&gt;) against them. By early August, some reports placed the number of suits nationwide at more than 100.