LATEST ADDITIONS

Last year, an audio dealer named Gordon Sauck called to get my permission to use a 1997 article of mine on his website. As I chatted with him, I realized there was a huge emerging trend to which I and most of the other guys who write about audio have been largely oblivious.

Sometimes the mere fact of something being inaccessible can enhance its value — a lot. Take Spotify, for example. For years we’ve wondered when music labels would finally allow the European online music service to make its supposed 15 million-track library available here. That day has finally arrived.

A friend who went to college in the late 1960s told me that everyone in his dorm fell into one of two absolutely opposing groups: those who blasted the Who’s Tommy and those who were mesmerized by the Beatles’ White Album. Or for the sticklers among you, the album nicknamed the White Album but officially known as The Beatles. I could entertain you with a few more sentences’ worth of metaphor, but you get the idea. You say tomato, I say tomahto.

“By the way, who is this Derek Jeter guy?” asked Sir Paul McCartney of the full crowd at Yankee Stadium on July 15, four songs deep into the opening night of his Summer 2011 On the Run tour. “Somebody said he has more hits than me.”

Hmm, not bloody likely.