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Last year in late October, Universal Music Group finally announcedhttp://www.stereophile.com/news/11476/">announced; its first set of SACD titles and the high-rez format's supporters jumped for joy. Then, at the January 2003 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Universal stood on the podium next to Sony and announced several key SACD releases from the Police, Peter Gabriel, and others.

Love it or loathe it, Internet music is here to stay.

Real businesses are moving into territory explored by the upstarts. On August 2, Universal">http://www.umusic.com/">Universal Music Group, the world's largest record label, announced that it will begin offering, on a trial basis, digital downloads of recordings from its massive catalog. The experiment is scheduled to begin this week, with an initial offering of about 60 songs from artists in several genres, including operatic tenor Luciano Pavarotti, jazz guitarist George Benson, and pop band Blink 182.

On February 16, Universal Music Group and MQA announced a multi-year agreement that will encode UMG's huge catalog of master recordings in MQA. In the language of the press release, the agreement promises "to make some of the world's most celebrated recordings available for the first time in Hi-Res Audio streaming." UMG's labels include ECM, Interscope, Geffen, A&M, Capitol, Island, Def Jam, Decca, Verve, Blue Note, Virgin, and EMI.

Universal Music Group must be taking its name seriously these days. At a time when some proclaim the demise">http://www.stereophile.com/news/031907premature">demise of the classical recording industry, the conglomerate's many subsidiaries —Decca, Deutsche Grammophon, Philips, and Archiv, along with ECM, which has only a marketing and distribution arrangement with UMG —are embracing new projects on multiple continents with determination and optimism.

Thumbing their collective nose at pundits who predict the imminent demise of physical media, Universal Music Group has begun reissuing select back catalog and new releases in Pure Audio (audio only) Blu-Ray 24/96 and/or 24/96 download formats. The first of the classical titles appeared in February, with more rolling out all the time. To get the skinny on UMG's plans for Blu-ray and hi-res, I conducted two separate interviews with folks in the UK. The first, with Barry Holden, the extremely committed and highly articulate VP of Classical Catalogue at Universal Music, appears below.

Universal Music Group (UMG) is currently fulfilling its promise to release hundreds of 24/96 High Fidelity Pure Audio Blu-Ray (audio only) titles in 14 countries by the end of 2014. While many of these titles are from its rich back catalog, a few are new. These include, on the pop front, George Michael's Symphonica, and for classical, one of my 2013 R2D4s, Jonas Kaufmann's Wagner.