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One of the most fascinating aspects of the digital age is that clever students—or sometimes, clever dropouts—can undo the work of teams of PhD engineers.

Dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century, the music industry may finally be settling into an uneasy acceptance that its market and business model have changed. Only two months after the successful launch of Apple's iTunes Music Store, Billboardhttp://www.billboard.com">Billboard; magazine announced that it would begin accounting for downloads in its weekly music rankings.

Music sales over the past two years have increased almost everywhere except near college campuses, according to a recent study undertaken by Reciprocal">http://www.reciprocal.com/">Reciprocal, Inc., a digital-rights management company. The first quarter of 2000 showed a 12% rise in overall music sales compared to the same period in 1998—except at stores located within five miles of a college campus. Reciprocal reached its conclusions based on figures supplied by sales-tracking organization Soundscan">http://wallofsound.go.com/charts/index.html/">Soundscan, Inc.

The Home Entertainment 2006 Show, June 1–4, 2006 in Los Angeles at the Sheraton Gateway Hotel, has announced a special benefit concert to support the Elf Foundation, a non-profit charity that creates Rooms of Magic—private entertainment theaters in children's hospitals that bring the enchantment of uplifting music and film to seriously ill children around the country. A portion of the concert admission will go to the Elf Foundation to support its wonderful work.

The advent of ubiquitous online digital audio file availability, not to mention a growing number of ways to effectively use a computer to organize and store a media library, has prompted futurists to begin declaring this the eve of the "digital den" era.

A new year-long download promotion may spell the death knell for digital rights management (DRM). The Pepsi promotion, which will be formally announced during the Super Bowl on February 3, will advertise a possible one billion downloadable MP3 files, which will be available through Amazon.com's download service, which does not feature DRM. We have not been able to obtain a list of participating labels to date, but since EMI, UMG, and Hollywood Records already participate at Amazon's MP3 store, they're probably involved. Less certain are Sony BMG and Warner Music Group (WMG), who seem to be sticking as much at the 40¢ per song (compared to 65–70¢ from Amazon or 70¢ from iTunes) offered by Pepsi as at the lack of DRM—although neither label has yet offered unprotected digital files.

The British Library vs DRM: The BBChttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4675280.stm">BBC; reported February 3 that Dr Clive Field, the British Library's director of scholarships and collections, called the increasing restrictions of fair use by digital rights management (DRM) cause for concern.