Warner Music Group has seemingly come to the realization that recorded music is too expensive for most people and will begin studying variable pricing with the hopes of finding "sweet spots" for consumers.
WMG has give Digonex Technologies the task of studying certain titles and certain retailers - no specifics yet - to generate recommendations on varying wholesale prices for select digital album downloads. Idea is to get prices in line with "perceived market value."
Apple's iTunes have long fought the idea of variable pricing, a concept that has been a mainstay in the brick-and-mortar world.(Wal-Mart, for example, wants only five prices for music, starting as low as $5.99). If wholesale prices vary and iTunes sticks to its one-price-fits-all, the music company can raise their hands and proclaim "hey, not our fault that music is so expensive." 
Digonex uses its a dynamic commerce engine DigitalOnlineExchange, which suggests changes to prices based upon behavioral principles. The principle: Sell as many as possible and make sure the customer feels like they got their money's worth.

Richard Kerris, the chief technical officer of Lucasfilm,  was also technical adviser to the last two Rolling Stones tours and in a recent interview with Variety's David Cohen he touted the Stones' technical adventurousness.
Kerris was the first person to show Keith Richards an iPod."I said ‘This can hold 4,000 songs.’ He looked at it and looked up and said ‘I better start writing.’"
Kerris says: "On the 40 Licks tour, which is where it started, they’d record every single show. They’ve done that for years, but what they’d do with the Licks tour, they would actually record it to a laptop. If you look at any of the old videos from that tour you’ll see a laptop, a Mac laptop sitting behind Charlie, everything’s recorded with these two stereo mics, so they have a rough, they have a full 48-track underneath, but everything goes into that laptop. Everything’s connected to a little distribution amp with five Firewire cables hanging off of it. So while the band was doing their bows and the fireworks were going at the very end, the backline crew would plug in their iPods, synchronize the thing, and put in their bathrobes an iPod that had that night’s show, so when they came offstage, they’d grab their stuff, get in their car and they would have the show with them right then and there. No one had done anything like that at all."
Soon after the iPod came out, "Mick was right on it. He was like, 'I want to get every night’s show so I can listen to it that night and know what was good and what didn’t work, etc.' So they established this whole thing working with the background crew, I showed them where you could daisy-chain the iPods and synchronize them at once. So it was really fun. From there they used GarageBand for their last album as they did all their demos. That was mainly Mick and Keith. Keith doesn’t use the computer as much, he just recognizes what part it plays."
There are two shots of Kerris in "Shine a Light" - he's stage left about 20 rows back. "Having seen the band as many times as I did, aside from rehearsals and backstage jamming, that was the best show they’ve ever done that I’ve seen. They were on fire."
On a  personal note, a few quick thoughts on the superb Imax version of the film "Shine a Light." Great version of "Some Girls"; using the sound mix to emphasize the musician on the screen is a risky choice that works almost every time; camerawork is so tight and steady one could count Mick's noticeable number of fillings; intimacy within a performance is impossible for Mick and Keith; "Sympathy for the Devil" is the best shot tune in the pic; Christina Aguilera should record "Live With Me" on her next album; and it's time to retire "Far Away Eyes."   

Figuring there aren't enough ways to get music to consumers, Disney has come up with CDVU+, a disc  designed to bridge the gap between physical CDs and the digital world.
The guinea pig will be the Jonas Brothers, the pop-punk teen trio whose second album will the first CDVU+ release. Details on exactly how this will work will be unveiled on Wednesday when some members of the media and fans get to test drive the format at a demonstration in New York.
Hollywood Records is referring to the CDVU+ as "a passport" into the artist's world. Despite the name, we assume this has nothing to do with CDs by the Velvet Underground.