Your intrepid correspondent is in Toronto to talk online music distribution. No easy task  when it's 180-degrees below 0 (C). A fellow I was meeting with said that Fahrenheit and Celsius "synch-up" at -35. Whatever. All this little California beach kid knows is that it's bone-breaking cold here.  The locals told me to be thankful there isn't any wind. Then they called me a wimp. (They're still a little grumpy around here because the NHL season was put on ice a couple of weeks ago.)

I'm here as a guest of Canadian Music Week to participate in a panel entitled, "Canada Saves the World (Or at least the music biz)." This particular track in the program was devised by Sandy Pearlman (famed producer of Blue Oyster Cult, The Clash, Pavlov's Dog, among others, and a founder of eMusic) and Professor Dan Levittin, Bell Chair, Psychology of Information Science, McGill University. Other panelists were Walter McDonough, chief legal counsel for the Future of Music Coalition; Charlie Angus, the only working musician who is also a member of the Canadian Parliament (he represents West Timmins-James Bay, and he's the lead singer/songwriter of the Grievous Angels); Richard Pfohl, general counsel of the Canadian Recording Industry Association; and the aforementioned Mssrs. Pearlman and Levittin. The panel was moderated by John Nichols, Washington Editor, The Nation magazine.

Here’s the situation facing music today, as described by Sandy:

Despite the tremendous business Apple's iTunes has done over the past two years, p2p traffic continues to grow and Apple's competitors continue to struggle to find traction in the market. 

A possible solution: Create a truly compelling alternative to P2P by combining new database architectures, search technology and rich music-recommendation engines to create what amounts to a massive music-delivery platform that sits on top of a "tank" of all known recorded music. How to distribute? Use a highly efficient distribution architecture such as BitTorrent. Consumers not only find what they're looking for, they are then presented with sets of recommendations, ranging from fairly obvious -- other songs or albums by the artist for which the original search was created -- to very deep recommendations based on the actual "DNA" of a song i.e. genre, instrumentation, rhythm patterns, pitch, structure etc. At the heart of this model is another very powerful attraction for music lovers, especially those who currently use P2P networks: the price per track must be low. How low? Try $.05/track. 

At a very high level, the system Sandy and Levittin outlined strikes me as being very similar to what Dell does with PCs: Drive all the costs out of a given product/platform, deliver it efficiently and spin the inventory like crazy. Think about it: any music-related query on a search engine such as Google could instantly be turned into a music transaction because: a) the consumer gets not only the result they were looking for the recommendation engine is presenting other works that are closely tied to the original request and b) at $.05, it's cheap. 

Levittin and Pearlman argue that Canada's uniquely positioned to be a test bed for such a platform because of its public policy (pro-arts, relatively artist-friendly copyrights, high regard for technologies that enable a more connected society etc.), and it has a very "wired" infrastructure. (I believe it has a higher per-capita broadband penetration that the U.S...)

Because of an unfortunate scheduling snafu, our panel was cut short before the audience could jump in and really stir the pot. This idea, however, is not going to go away. We might be spending a lot more time in Canada. But maybe just during the summer...

Good news, bad news. Adobe Premiere Elements has arrived (thanks to the nice people at Adobe) and it’s a very intuitive editing tool. Bad news is that it does not support native MPEG4 files. My sense is that is a short-term issue; as more MPEG-4 cameras make their way into consumers’ hands, my hunch is that a plug in will be available to import MPEG-4 files.

For now, I will covert my files to AVI and then edit them.

Here comes content foraging. A good first step. Next will be the ability for a commuter to download what he or she likes.

By late spring, the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority will become the first North American subway to pump television and radio feeds into its rail cars. Each of its 230 rail cars will be outfitted with 15-inch flat screens that will offer a local television news loop from ABC affiliate, WSB-TV, and transmitters that will offer three formats of on-board music—top 40, jazz and R&B.

In a deal with New York-based media company The Rail Network, MARTA will get a cut of the revenue from the advertising on the televisions and the on-train music channels. MARTA stands to make $20 million over the next decade, said David Lane, chief executive officer of The Rail Network.

Lane said he expects Washington and Vancouver, Canada, to follow Atlanta’s lead. He said he’s had discussions with every major transit authority in North America, and his company plans to cater each system’s content to the wants of that particular city.