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Will the future of audio distribution be dominated by discs or downloads? Will we always have both?

As the cost of data storage has continued to plunge, some industry pundits (well, www.stereophile.com's Jon Iverson) have predicted that the next step in adding value to them would be to give the devices away, but sell the music or data they contain. On March 10, online music label Magnatunehttp://www.magnatune.com">Magnatune; and Samsung spin-off Hana">http://www.hanamicron.com/">Hana Micron fulfilled that prediction with a product called the TunePlug: It's a reusable USB flash memory drive that comes loaded with 10 complete albums from Magnatune artists in MP3 file format.

On March 10, http://www.tymphany.com ">Tymphany Corporation and Danish">http://www.d-s-t.com">Danish Sound Technology (DST) announced a merger of the two companies, funded by Vantage Point Venture Partners. The combined company, to be called Tymphany Corporation, will have its headquarters in Cupertino, CA.

Depending on who you talk to, so far in the US, DualDisc has either been a success (according to the record labels) or a stumble (according to the press and manufacturers). Now Europe gets a chance to see what the fuss is all about.

As rules of thumb go, this one is pretty infallible: By the time we've heard about it, a trend's hippest participants will think it's on the decline. That means that mashups, or the manipulation of the musical genetic material of several different songs to create a new song, may be on their way out, because we've become infatuated with them.

Gunther Frohnhöfer, Acoustic Signature turntable designer and company owner, informed me last week that the business relationship between his company and Ballmann, the manufacturer of the German Behold line of electronics, which includes a headshell-mounted 768kHz/24-bit A/D converter (see my "Analog Corner" column in the forthcoming April 2005 issue of Stereophile), has been severed. Frohnhöfer has relinquished his position as Ballmann's general manager. "Doing both my own product and the Behold electronics line was too much for one person to handle," he told me. Instead, Frohnhöfer will focus on his core turntable business, while Mr. Ballmann will continue developing, manufacturing, and marketing his electronics line.

Music buyers will find a new report issued by Parks">http://www.parksassociates.com">Parks Associates both interesting and disturbing. Interesting in what it purports to reveal about consumers, and, as we shall see, disturbing in how the music industry is being urged to interpret the data.