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Satellite radio is poised to become a dominant force in the 21st century. Both XM">http://www.xmradio.com">XM Radio and Sirius">http://www.siriusradio.com">Sirius Radio are now in full operation, with subscriptions booming and compatible electronics available at dealers nationwide.

Many audiophiles eager to try their new high-resolution disc players have been disappointed to discover skimpy offerings of Super Audio CDs and DVD-A recordings at their local music marts. Fortunately, several online sources stock such discs, and are constantly updating their inventories.

US Senator Joseph Biden has introduced a bill that would give law-enforcement agencies stronger tools to pursue copyright violators, and would give copyright holders stronger grounds for suing pirates.

It's a sobering thought: it was the computer manufacturers and software developers, not the consumer electronics industry, who enabled the biggest audio format since the CD to become popular. The format, which hasn't done much to impress audiophiles, but has greatly enhanced the portability of music, is MP3 and CE manufacturers are only now trying to catch up with products that take advantage of its widespread use.

Alan Lomax, the folklorist and musicologist whose work spurred the folk music revival of the 1950s and '60s, died on Friday, July 19 at a nursing home in Safety Harbor, FL. He was 87.

Love it or hate it, MP3 users are a huge new market, as yet untapped by the music industry. Portable digital compressed-audio players, whether employing Flash memory or compact hard drives à la Apple's iPod, are estimated to begin reaching critical-mass sales numbers around 2006, with an installed base of 24 million units by 2007. Most observers agree that this dramatic growth has been driven, in large part, by the vast quantity of no-fee music that is available in the format, as well as the players' ease of use and flexibility.

Taking the measure of the Chord">http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/624/">Chord Electronics DAC64 D/A processor, John Atkinson finds nice things can come in strange packages. "Such is the pace of development in digital technology these days that it is hard not to become convinced that digital playback is a solved problem." But, as JA discovers, not all solutions are identical.

The National">http://www.nab.org">National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) has initiated its planned appeal of a ruling by the Librarian of Congress that establishes a royalty rate for all Webcasters, including traditional radio stations that stream their programming on the Internet.

As some readers may suspect, more music is heard in the automobile than in the home. Taking a clue from this trend, many high-end audio companies are finding their way into your car, and factory installed systems are getting better and better. Examples include the Mark Levinson audio system found in cars from Lexus, the debut of Lexicon's L7 surround system in a BMW at the 2002 CES, Linn's partnership">http://www.stereophile.com/news/11285/">partnership with Aston Martin, Harman's partnership with Mercedes Benz, and the Dynaudio/Dolby Surround systems found in several of Volvo's cars.

Historically, radio stations have only partially cooperated with record label attempts to control when and where an important new record is first aired. It's not unusual for a new album or single to be "embargoed" until a specific date by the labels, with stations often competing with each other to find ways to get around this restriction and be first to air a hot new song.