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LinkTV Site Features Caetano Veloso, Amadou & Mariam Video

In this week's sparkling new 40th Anniversary edition of Rolling Stone, the magazine calls readers' attention to linktv.org/worldmusic, the international nonprofit network LinkTV 's site for on-demand streaming music videos, interviews, and documentaries on music and musicians from around the world.

Among the site's featured materials are concert footage of Malian singers Amadou & Mariam performing songs from their smash CD Dimanche à Bamako in Paris and a documentary feature that, in the words of its host, "looks at Brazil and its music through the eyes and voice of it greatest songwriter and poet, Caetano Veloso."

To watch Amadou & Mariam in concert, click here.

To see the site's documentary on Caetano, click here.

Alex Ross and Ben Ratliff in a Slate Dialogue

This week in Slate, New Yorker classical music critic Alex Ross and New York Times jazz and pop critic Ben Ratliff engage in a Dialogue about music in and outside of the fields they generally cover. In a posting today, Ross tips his hat to jazz clubs for providing a more genuine, less pretentious space in which to enjoy music than the more reverent classical concert hall, where the composer's score is sacrosanct and even the moments for applause are prescribed. Still, he's happy to note a new trend in the classical world towards a more improvisatory experience, stemming in part from the predominance of composer-performers in post-War music:

In the new-music world, a not inconsiderable fraction of post-1945 music requires invention on the part of the performers. Since the minimalist revolution of the 1960s, when  Philip Glass and Steve Reich led their own ensembles, composer-performers have come to the fore ... The sharp division of labor between composer and performer is breaking down.

To read more of the Ross-Ratliff exchange, visit slate.com.

Apple Drops Price of DRM-Free Tracks to 99 Cents

Apple announced today a reduction in the price of its iTunes Plus tracks to 99 cents, matching the price of  its standard downloads. The higher-quality iTunes Plus files—compressed at 256 kbps rather than the 128 kbps of other iTunes tracks—are sold free of DRM (digital-rights management) restrictions, making them accessible on any number of digital players. Apple also announced that the number of tracks available as iTunes Plus files has expanded to more than two million. For more information, visit apple.com.