Wes Phillips

Over the last several weeks, one newspaper after another has made note of Nielsen Soundscan's 2006 point-of-purchase data, which showed classical record sales up 22.5%, making it the "fastest growing" category for the year. Hip-hop was down (-20.7%), R&B was down (-18.4%), alternative was down (-9.2%), jazz was down (-8.3%)&mdash;soundtracks were up (+19%), but everybody dismissed that, attributing it to the dominance of a single title, <I>High School Musical</I>.

On March 2, the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) published a <A HREF="http://www.loc.gov/crb/proceedings/2005-1/rates-terms2005-1.pdf">"Deter… of Rates and Terms,"</A> which announced an artist and recording company royalty fee structure for Internet radio based upon a "per song" structure. As it so happens, that was the model proposed by <A HREF="http://www.soundexchange.com/">SoundExchange</A&gt;, a digital fee collection agency founded by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

<I>StreetTech</I> has the cutest little portables from the 1920s

Huckleberry is ever vigilant, keeping my desktop 100% rodent free. And birds&mdash;no birds here!

Why is the mammal ear more complex than the reptile ear?

<I>Smithsonian</I> on girl groups.

Robert Love gives us some historical perspective on non-factual "news." My favorite bit comes from his report of a 1903 <I>Washington Post</I> article on the unreliability of news garnered by remote stringers.