Following Up: Dead Downloads Restored; TW, Lazard Boards Share Director

Downloads of the Dead are Not Dead Yet: Trying to back away from what charitably can be termed a debacle, the Grateful Dead is allowing the Internet Archive to provide audience recordings of concerts as downloads again; the official band soundboard recordings are still stream only. The coverage refers to the possible competition between the free recordings and the Dead’s own pay downloads of live concerts. But the equation also includes iTunes, the only other official pay download site for the Dead’s live recordings and the only place for commercial downloads of singles from those concerts. (Fans of the Dead will understand this frustrating twist — singles sales are limited to songs under 10 minutes; anything over requires buying the album.) Why buy when there may be a free download of the same performance? Ease and quality; the audience recordings can vary wildly.

TW, Lazard Have More In Common Than Icahn: Turns out the firm hired to help Carl Icahn challenge Time Warner and the media company share an independent director: former Harvard Law School dean Robert C. Clark, an expert in corporate governance. No comment from Clark but a fellow corporate governance expert calls it “an awkward position” with “a potentially conflicting fiduciary duty.” He joined the TW board first.

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