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It was like old times. A major consumer electronics company was presenting a press conference in a high-rent venue to introduce its new audio products. These events used to be commonplace; now they are rare. But on September 4, in Manhattan's Jazz at Lincoln Center, to an audience that included record company executives from Universal, Warner, and Sony Music, HDTracks' Norman and David Chesky, Chad Kassem and Marc Sheforgen from Acoustic Sounds, whose new DSD download store was last week's big news, musician Herbie Hancock, and veteran mastering engineer Mark Wilder, Phil Molyneux, President and Chief Operating Officer of Sony Electronics since September 2010, announced that the company saw high-resolution audio as the future of recorded music playback.

While Apple's iTunes and RealNetworks Rhapsody are battling it out in the music download ring (see related">http://www.stereophile.com/news/032204itunes">related story), and Microsoft is rumored to be eyeing a corner, Sony has now decided to join the fray with a new music service announced last week in Europe.

Where Sony goes, the electronics industry follows. And Sony is going on the Internet—not merely with product information and links to dealers, but with sales direct to consumers. The announcement was made late in January by Sony">http://www.sony.com/sel">Sony Electronics president Teruaki Aoki. "We cannot neglect the customers' viewpoint," Aoki said, acknowledging that serving consumers is a higher priority for the electronics giant than protecting dealers.

There's gold in them digital music hills. This obvious reality---supported by the music industry's near-panic in the face of the phenomenal growth of MP3 in the past year---was reinforced last week, when Sony">http://www.sony.com/">Sony Corporation and International">http://www.ibm.com/">International Business Machines announced a digital music mutual-aid pact at a press conference in Los Angeles.

At a Hi-Res Symposium presented by The Digital Entertainment Group (DEG) on June 1 in Capitol's legendary Studio A in Hollywood, representatives from record labels, Sony, Capitol Studios, and The Recording Academy's Producers and Engineers wing discussed the future of high-resolution digital audio.

Will music fans willingly pay for what they've been getting free? With the shuttering of free music site Napster a strong probability, two giants of the music industry are moving forward with plans to roll out a subscriber-based online music distribution plan.

After posting a round-uphttp://www.stereophile.com/news/110705sony/">round-up; of the news about Sony BMG's F4i's XCP digital rights management system (DRM), which hid itself inside consumers' computers' root-kit code, I spent a frantic week simply trying to keep up with all of the breaking news on the issue on my bloghttp://blog.stereophile.com/wesphillips/">blog;. During the week of November 7, I posted no fewer than 9 URLs outlining breaking news on the Sony story. However, by the end of the week, the company was reeling from the news that hackers had managed to install malware (malicious programs that dismantle a computer's firewall protection) on consumers' computers that masked its presence by using the hidden software placed there by Sony BMG's DRM system.