Perhaps the life of June Carter Cash will always rest in the shadow of her husband, who passed away a mere four months after she did in 2003, though one gets the impression from the many collaborations found on this compilation (and from her selflessness in support of her famous husband and children) that perhaps her intention was never to be the "star", but to be the woman standing at the center of an unbroken circle of family, creativity, integrity, and love. By merely listening to her 1999 recording of "Will the Circle Be Unbroken", one cannot help but feel moved to faith that this legacy will find its expression in the next generation of musicians.

June Carter Cash: Keep on the Sunny Side

Technically, it's still a coffeehouse.

"The overall strategy is to build Starbucks into a destination. It's not about driving coffee sales. It's about providing the music consumer new ways to acquire and discover music. This is a transformational opportunity."

I do like Hear Music.

DVDs and Fries: New Ways To Consume Technology

I take considerable pride in my huge collection and carefully refined taste. And I consider bad rock taste--or, worse, no rock taste at all--clear evidence of a fallow soul. I am, in other words, a certified Rock Snob. But I fear that Rock Snobs are in grave danger. We are being ruined by the iPod.

In some ways, the iPod revolution is a Rock Snob's dream. Now, nearly all rock music is easily and almost instantly attainable, either via our friends' computers or through online file-sharing networks.

But there's a dark side to the iPod era. Snobbery subsists on exclusivity. And the ownership of a huge and eclectic music collection has become ordinary.

In the context of book-collecting, the philosopher Walter Benjamin spoke of "the thrill of acquisition." But, when everything's instantly available online, the thrill is gone.

Remastered

In the frazzled world of country and western music, the crap that passes with that tag today comes along the same lines as blues: people are trying hard to replicate the masters of the past, but only one or two can nail it with conviction. Even amongst his finest peers, there was only one Johnny Cash. He was the artist who melded several genres together without bastardizing a single one, and he didn't need any tricks to do so. His was a natural talent, and even up until a week before he died, he dedicated himself to his career. He will be missed. The Legend is a perfect time capsule of the legend that became Johnny Cash. The one word that best describes the late Cash and his music: masterpiece.

Johnny Cash: The Legend

Elvis Presley seemed like a caricature in his last few years, but a caricature of what we didn’t know.

After a lifetime of not getting it, I finally experienced my very own Elvis epiphany, and the mystery of why he is considered one of the great pop performers of all time was revealed to me.

Presley’s innovation wasn’t that he sounded either black or like a hillbilly; it was the brilliant way he drew on all strains of pop music.

If there is a split between Presley and what came before him, it is mainly in the sense of demographics. Presley represents a point of demarcation in that his music was directed almost exclusively at kids.

What made rock ’n’ roll different from all other earlier kinds of pop was not the music itself but the marketing.

Somehow, a kind of radical, extreme purism has become the norm with regard to their music. Certain puritans apparently can’t stand the idea that Louis Armstrong made music other than jazz or that by 1960 Presley, tired of doing one rehash of "Don’t Be Cruel" after another, was similarly broadening his horizons ... gospel albums represented probably his greatest work.

The two central expressions of African-American music are the blues and gospel, and they are flip sides of each other. In their purest forms, blues deals with the darkness and gospel with the light, blues with the flesh and gospel with the spirit, blues with the earth and gospel with the sky. Presley unfailingly said that gospel was his favorite music.

Perhaps to stick to your standards in Hollywood, you had to be something of a gangster.

Elvis Today: not who you always thought he was

Final figures from the BBC show that the complete Beethoven symphonies on its website were downloaded 1.4m times.

It would take a commercial CD recording of the complete Beethoven symphonies "upwards of five years" to sell as many downloads as were shifted from the BBC website in two weeks.

The downloads marked "an important moment, when you see how the world is changing", said Roger Wright, the controller of Radio 3.

Radio 3 plans a similar week of broadcasts to its Beethoven Experience later in the year, devoted to Bach.

Beethoven beats Bono

What's a music-download fan to do -- actually pay for music?

If it comes to that, they'll find that a lot has changed in the online music business.

These rental-music outfits are highly conducive to exploring and discovering new music. They're ideal if your taste leans toward what one Internet wag calls Disposable Contemporary.

Britney to Rent, Lease or Buy

... as a collection of bossa nova versions of new wave classics by fetching French and Brazilian chanteuses ...

This unlikely, but mostly happy, marriage of new wave and bossa nova will probably disappoint or displease purists who believe that every version of "Love Will Tear Us Apart" should have the brooding intensity of the original, but everyone else can enjoy the album's playful elegance.

Selected dates of live performances:

SAT 09/10 NEW YORK: Joe's Pub
TUES 09/13 NEW YORK: Joe's Pub
WED 09/14 NEW YORK: Canal Room - CMJ
SAT 09/24 SAN FRANCISCO: Bimbo's
MON 09/25 LOS ANGELES: the Hollywood Bowl with DEAD CAN DANCE

Nouvelle Vague

The rest of the Beethoven symphonies will be broadcast and posted this week. Listen while you read the Grokster decision.

Symphony 6 will be broadcast on Monday 27th June, and available to download from Tuesday 28th June to Monday 4th July.

Symphony 7 will be broadcast on Tuesday 28th June, and available to download from Wednesday 29th June to Tuesday 5th July.

Symphony 8 will be broadcast on Wednesday 29th June, and available to download from Thursday 30th June to Wednesday 6th July.

Symphony 9 will be broadcast on Thursday 30th June, and available to download from Friday 1st July to Thursday 7th July.

BBC - Radio 3 - Beethoven Experience - downloads

More at OECD Work on Digital Content

... a comprehensive analysis on digital broadband content, focusing on growth and value creation, drivers and barriers to growth, and changing market structures and emerging issues with development of new delivery platforms.

The Working Party on the Information Economy (WPIE) is undertaking stocktaking studies of sectors where digital content is transforming value chains and business models. Initial sectors studied are: scientific publishing, music, online computer and video games and mobile content services. The studies are designed to further identify analytical, policy and measurement issues, and prepare the ground for more in-depth analysis of horizontal issues and challenges to broadband content development and applications.

You may be interested in the bibliography, which includes, among much else:

Stardom, Peer-to-peer and the Socially Optimal Distribution of Music

Navigating through this space, you'll find Microsoft's lessons learned in the first year of XBox Live, where Michel Cassius says that social networking is the key to taking online gaming to the mass market.

OECD Report on Digital Music