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After months of wrangling, the Secure">http://www.sdmi.org/">Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) has announced its first set of standards for portable digital music devices. Manufacturers can now incorporate these standards into the designs of new products. Many industry observers believe that portables will be the next big wave in consumer audio, expected to hit the market by the winter holiday season.

Internet music retailer CDnowhttp://www.cdnow.com/">CDnow; has formed a partnership with Sony">http://www.sony.com/">Sony Corporation and Time">http://www.timewarner.com/">Time Warner to build a music and video retailing behemoth. The July 13 announcement came in the wake of online bookseller Amazon.com's">http://www.amazon.com/">Amazon.com's recent move into the music market. With the backing of corporate giants Sony and Time Warner, CDnow could be able to mount a challenge to the growing presence of Amazon, which is also expanding into toy sales and consumer electronics.

Last week, satellite-to-car radio broadcaster CD">http://www.cdradio.com/">CD Radio announced an agreement with mobile electronics manufacturer Alpine">http://www.alpine1.com/">Alpine Electronics for the design and development of satellite radio receivers. Under the terms of the agreement, Alpine says it will design and develop three-band (AM/FM/CD Radio) audio receivers for installation by car manufacturers. The company also plans to design and develop satellite radio receivers for sale directly to consumers in the electronics aftermarket.

One would think that the Internet was growing crowded with online music retailers such as CDnow/N2K, Amazon.com, EveryCD, and Tower Records, just to name a few, all hustling CDs. But the lure of gold in them e-commerce hills is hard to resist. Last week, barnesandnoble.comhttp://barnesandnoble.com">barnesandnoble.com; jumped into the fray and announced the launch of its own Music Store, featuring what the company describes as the first "online classical music superstore." Notably late to market with its online bookselling franchise, barnesandnoble.com hopes to gain ground against arch-rival Amazon.com by expanding beyond books and better focusing on niche markets.

Last week, the Secure Digital Music Initiative announced that it would allow free MP3 downloads to co-exist with new encrypted forms of digital music transmission. Despite this, widespread concern in corporate legal departments about copyright-violation liability has prompted software developers to come up with blocking techniques to prevent pirated music from entering company "Intranets."

Since the earliest days of stereo—the first experiments with more than single-channel sound happened back in the 1930s—recording and playback have been based on a horizontal model: left-center-right, left-rear, right-rear. "Laterality," as it's sometimes called, can be exploited very well in creating plausible sensations of spatial events, especially by film-industry sound engineers. The believable reproduction of music is considerably more problematic.

According to a recent report released by Information Technology researchers Frost">http://www.frost.com">Frost & Sullivan, the world Internet audio market generated revenues totaling $42 million in 1998, which dwarfs the 1997 revenues by 1516%. The report predicts that this market will continue growing at a healthy rate, achieving an increase into the triple percentage digits by the end of 1999.