News

Looks like it might be a while before a profitable formula jells for selling music over the Internet. News this week indicates that one of the largest music retailers, Tower">http://www.towerrecords.com">Tower Records, is finally ready to challenge the market, while online distribution pioneer N2Khttp://www.n2k.com">N2K; will be scaling back operations until things steady a bit.

The latest music-piracy statistics have just been released by the RIAAhttp://www.riaa.com/">RIAA;, bringing to light several new wrinkles in the ongoing struggle to protect the owners of music copyrights from those who illegally copy and sell protected works. Released August 21, the report details the new problems brought about by CD-R technology and MP3 files distributed via the web.

The Federal">http://www.fcc.gov/">Federal Communications Commission is fighting an epidemic called "microradio." The agency has closed 250 unlicensed stations in the past year, most of them low-powered urban pip-squeaks with less than 100W of power and broadcast radii of 10 miles or less. The typical microradio station offers an off-center perspective on local, national, and world events to a listenership of a few hundred people, and loses money in the process.

Up from the deep: Torrance, CA-based Wherehouse">http://wherehouse.com/">Wherehouse Entertainment announced last week that it will purchase Blockbuster">http://www.blockbuster.com/music">Blockbuster Music from Viacom Inc. for $115 million. The merged operation will have 598 stores throughout North America, second only to Minnesota-based Musicland. The deal comes at the end of a prolonged slump for the music industry, one that was particularly hard for Blockbuster.

As with past HI-FI Shows, we asked visitors to HI-FI '98 to vote for the room that offered what they thought to be the best sound. The ballot in the Show Guide asked visitors to list the best, second-best, third-best, and worst sounds, for which I allocated 3 points, 2 points, 1 point, and -1 point, respectively. Any exhibitor that received more than 0.7% of the total votes cast is listed in the Table. I've tried to include both the exhibitors and the brands demonstrated, as listed in the Show Guide and in our report text in the September issue of the paper Stereophile. My apologies if I've left anyone out.

The Paradigm">http://www.paradigm.ca">Paradigm Group announced today that they have entered into an agreement to purchase the assets of Sonic">http://www.sonicfrontiers.com">Sonic Frontiers Inc., of Oakville, Ontario, as the first step in a comprehensive restructuring plan that will lead to an expansion of Sonic Frontiers.

Another crucial piece of the DVD-Audio puzzle fell into place recently when the WG-4 (Working Group 4) DVD-Audio Working Group approved the adoption of MLP (see previous articles 1http://www.stereophile.com/news/10188/">1;, 2http://www.stereophile.com/news/10200/">2;) as the lossless algorithm for DVD-Audio at its August 5th meeting in Tokyo. WG-4 will require official approval from its supervising organizations, the Technical Coordination Group and Steering Committee---considered a formality at this point.