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In the age before recordings, music was a service business. Composers wrote for their patrons, and musicians performed for money. In the days since Edison's inventions, music has become a commodity business in which record companies stockpile large inventories and attempt to move them into the market of music lovers through a dense network of distributors and retailers. For established artists, the service aspect of music---playing for pay---now exists primarily to support the commodity business. For developing artists, public performance is a form of self-promotion to aid the search for a recording contract.

Russia has a new organization that will promote a legitimate music industry and fight industrial piracy, according to mid-May reports from the International">http://www.ifpi.org">International Federation of Phonographic Industries.

Ruth Laredo, a classical pianist whose style combined passionate ferocity with refined elegance, died May 25 of ovarian cancer, which she had battled for four years. Her last performance was May 6 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in one of her long-running performance/lecture sessions known as "Concertos with Commentary," a format that was so popular that she had begun to offer it in other venues around the world.

The music industry is clearly redoubling its efforts to market DVD-Audio, with the proposed">http://www.stereophile.com/news/080904dualdisc/">proposed launch of the DualDisc format. Adding either video content or high-rez audio or both to a standard CD looks to be the new strategy for adding value—an acknowledgement that just offering non–CD-compatible high-rez audio is not enough.

What's a home-entertainment show without an assortment of state-of-the-art audio demonstrations? EgglestonWorkshttp://www.egglestonworks.com">EgglestonWorks; has announced that its next generation Andra II speaker will be featured as part of what it calls an "unprecedented" demonstration of multichannel Super Audio CD (SACD) to be conducted during the upcoming Home">http://www.homeentertainment-expo.com">Home Entertainment 2002 Show May 30 through June 2 at the New York Hilton.

Last week at the Audio Engineering Society Convention in New York City, Sonic">http://www.sonic.com">Sonic Solutions announced that it plans to introduce what it says is the world's first digital audio workstation based on Sony's new Direct Stream Digital (DSD) technology. Sonic says that the new system, SonicStudio HD-DSD, is being developed in cooperation with Sony">http://www.sony.com">Sony Corporation and will provide the recording industry with a mastering tool for the new Super Audio CD (SACD) format.

An unusual tropical rain welcomed the Audio">http://www.aes.org/">Audio Engineering Society to its 109th gathering, held at the Los Angeles Convention Center September 22–25. Audiophiles may breathe a collective sigh of relief to learn that the Super Audio Compact Disc is getting a big push, not only from corporate parents Sony/Philips but from studio-equipment makers, consumer-electronics companies, and—perhaps most important—music labels.