Barry Willis

An improved digital-audio compression standard has been adopted by the <A HREF="http://www.bmg.com/">Bertelsmann Music Group</A> (BMG) and the <A HREF="http://www.umusic.com/">Universal Music Group</A> for commercial music downloads. "Advanced Audio Coding" (AAC) is said to offer higher audio quality while occupying 30% less bandwidth and storage space than the popular MP3 format, according to an announcement from San Francisco&ndash;based <A HREF="http://www.dolby.com/">Dolby Laboratories</A>.

Music lovers who availed themselves of <A HREF="http://www.mp3.com/">MP3.com</A>'s uploading-archiving-and-accessing services are about to become the next target market for the music industry. Nearing the end of protracted litigation brought against it by the music industry's "Big Five," the online music venture has announced a marketing service that will promote new commercial recordings directly to its users through e-mails. The recordings will be on labels under the control of MP3.com's opponents in the year-long copyright wrangle.

The public auction of the assets of <A HREF="http://www.wadia.com/">Wadia Digital Corporation</A> has been postponed for at least two weeks, according to an employee of the Minneapolis law firm Siegel, Brill, Greupner, Duffy & Foster, P.A., which is handling the liquidation.

After a May 10 <A HREF="http://stereophile.com/news/10744/"&gt; announcement</A> from the Federal Trade Commission that it had negotiated a settlement with the music industry's "Big Five" over a controversial pricing policy, enterprising private attorneys wasted little time initiating class-action lawsuits (<A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10750/">1</A&gt;, <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10803/">2</A&gt;) against them. By early August, some reports placed the number of suits nationwide at more than 100.

Real businesses are moving into territory explored by the upstarts. On August 2, <A HREF="http://www.umusic.com/">Universal Music Group</A>, the world's largest record label, announced that it will begin offering, on a trial basis, digital downloads of recordings from its massive catalog. The experiment is scheduled to begin this week, with an initial offering of about 60 songs from artists in several genres, including operatic tenor Luciano Pavarotti, jazz guitarist George Benson, and pop band Blink 182.

In December, after months of conducting listening tests with audio professionals in the US, the <A HREF="http://www.sdmi.org/">Secure Digital Music Initiative</A> (SDMI) choose a watermarking technology from <A HREF="http://www.verance.com/">Verance Corporation</A> for DVD-Audio copyright protection. Test results had indicated that Verance's system was the least detectable of the contenders under consideration.

The last week of July was a busy one for music-industry attorneys&mdash;and, by some measures, a successful one. As almost everyone in the world is aware, on Wednesday, July 26, the <A HREF="http://www.riaa.com/">Recording Industry Association of America</A> (RIAA) won a round in its fight against <A HREF="http://www.napster.com/">Napster</A&gt;, a San Mateo, California&ndash;based software company that enables the sharing of MP3 music files over the Internet. On that day, in a US Federal court in San Francisco, Judge Marilyn Patel decreed that the widespread sharing of music using Napster was a form of wholesale copyright violation, and ordered the service shut down effective midnight on Friday, July 28. Napster, in turn, appealed and won a stay of execution two days after Judge Patel's ruling that will enable it to remain online and in business until at least mid-September.