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One of the industry's most ambitious digital distribution programs has been announced by Warner">http://www.timewarner.com/corp/about/music/wmg/index.html">Warner Music Group. In November, WMG will make more than 1000 albums and singles available as downloads through several online music retailers, using RealNetworks&#039">http://www.realnetworks.com/">RealNetworks' RealPlayer software. Music fans in the US and Canada are the target audience for the download program, according to a September 11 press release.

As promisedhttp://www.stereophile.com/news/011904roundup/index.html">promised; earlier in January, Warner">http://www.wmg.com">Warner Music Group has announced a major restructuring that it hopes will put it in better shape to compete in the "challenging business environment of today's music industry." The move comes after the recent closing of WMG's $2.6 billion acquisition by Edgar Bronfman, Jr. and a group of investors.

Many people remember the 1990 Milli Vanilli scandal, in which Rob Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan were stripped of their Best New Artist Grammy award when it was revealed they hadn't actually performed on the disc. Of course, "borrowing" has long been a part of the pop music world, as George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord," Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love," and almost any sampled recording can attest; however, most listeners have probably assumed things are a lot more straightforward in the world of classical performance and recording.

There appears to be nothing more important to the music business today than controlling the distribution and use of digital content on the web and in the home. Proprietary schemes to prevent or control the use of audio files have become hot commodities and valuable assets for many companies. Liquid">http://www.liquidaudio.com">Liquid Audio recently announced that the US Patent Office has awarded the company a patent (#6,219,634) for its watermark technique used for distributing secure digital music files.

Record labels have found that CDs with built-in restriction technologies have not worked in all CD players, have been incompatiblehttp://www.stereophile.com/news/11341/">incompatible; with some computers, and have engendered considerable backlash from irate consumers. But why should that stop them?

As digitally recorded music moves through the recording and production chain, it can be handed off to a variety of studios, musicians, producers, record label executives, and mastering engineers. Sometimes this is done with a recordable CD or DVD, sometimes with a portable hard disk, and sometimes via a high-bandwidth Internet connection. Somewhere along the way, a good percentage of those files (some estimate up to 80%) get copied in an unauthorized manner and quickly end up on">http://www.stereophile.com/news/11585/">on the Internet or on the street as pirated CDs before any official discs are released.

For the 109th convention of the Audio">http://www.aes.org/">Audio Engineering Society, the main floor of the L.A. Convention Center was transformed into a bazaar of new tools for audio professionals—but the panel discussions upstairs were where the real action took place. On Friday, September 22—just an hour before researchers Dr. Stanley Lipshitz and John Vanderkooy of Ontario's University of Waterloo presented a paper offering a mathematical proof for the "imperfectability" of one-bit delta-sigma recording systems—Sony Corporation issued a clarification of the technical standards for its Direct Stream Digital technology, the basis of the Super Audio Compact Disc. DSD, it now appears, is a one-bit technique as it applies to consumer playback systems, but uses a multi-bit PCM quantizer [presumably within a delta-sigma converter negative-feedback loop; see an article on this subject in the forthcoming November issue of Stereophile—Ed.] at the recording and mastering ends of the business. (The Lipshitz/Vanderkooy paper is available as AES preprint #5188.)