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Will the official online music gates finally stream open and flood us with non-pirated tunes? Perhaps. One important step in the process has finally been taken. The National">http://www.nmpa.org">National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA), the Harry Fox Agency (HFA), and the Recording">http://www.riaa.com">Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced last week that they have come to a "breakthrough" agreement on the licensing of musical works for new subscription services on the Internet.

Specific Live Streams (Scroll down for ongoing series):

• Thursday, May 7 10pm EDT: The Noe Music Listening Club features composer Jake Heggie discussing and performing his music and that of his music heroes. Sign up here.

• The Metropolitan Opera streams live performances for 25 hours. This week’s schedule is:
  May 6 Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin
  May 7 Strauss’s Capriccio
  May 8 Puccini’s La Bohème
  May 9 The Opera House
  May 10 Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana / Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci.

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Last week's online">http://www.stereophile.com/vote.shtml">online poll indicates that many Stereophile readers have an ongoing affinity for the retro design style of older audio gear. Several respondents say they find the warm glow of tubes and backlit displays seductively attractive in a darkened room, while others pine for the days of analog dials and softly lit meters with gently bouncing needles.

Students are often described as people with more time than money. For four accused by the recording industry of being "nodes" for file sharing, the lack of money will almost certainly extend well beyond graduation day.

Rogier van Bakel grapples with his M6 dreams in the Studio Electric room at AXPONA 2026.

The global market for music could reach $42.8 billion within five years—more than $7.5 billion higher than the present level, according to a recent study by PriceWaterhouseCoopershttp://www.pwcglobal.com/">PriceWaterhouseCoopers; and Wilkofsky">http://www.wilkofskygruen.com/">Wilkofsky Gruen Associates. In the about-to-be-released study, The Global Entertainment & Media Outlook: 2000–2004, the firms make their prediction based on buying patterns and other economic factors in several regions of the world.

Napster may be down for the count, but its millions of former members are happily swapping audio files elsewhere, according to an October 10 report from technology research firm Jupiter">http://www.jmm.com">Jupiter Media Metrix Inc.

In an effort to move their businesses into cyberspace, record labels and audio content distributors are still experimenting with their online formulas. Key to the new economic models for selling music over the Net is this question: Would you rather pay a monthly subscription fee to download music, or pay for music track by track? According to market researcher Gartner">http://gartner11.gartnerweb.com/public/static/home/home.html">Gartner Group, sites that plan to sell music via the subscription model should seriously reconsider.

We've reported many times on the mass lawsuits filed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) against individuals or institutions that it alleges are illegally participating in peer-to-peer file-sharing activities, so we felt it only fair to report on a lawsuit where the trade group is being sued. Actually, the RIAA's attorneys are being sued by James and Angela Nelson, who were themselves the target of Motown v. Nelson, which alleged that the couple had allowed an employee of Ms. Nelson's home-run daycare center to access P2P websites from their computer.

As it has for the last 12 years, The">http://www.thecableco.com/">The Cable Company, along with many of its vendors, is dedicating August to help some of "the poorest people in the most ravaged regions of the world."