• Rhapsody subscribers, here's a playlist with 36 tracks from 18 of last Tuesday's new releases (including His Name is Alive, Il Divo, UB40, Tha Alkaholics, Audio Bullys, Cat Power, Fivespeed, Saint Etienne, Rosanne Cash, P.O.D., Yellowcard, Film School and Robert Pollard).

• The Rambler Blog has a long (long, long) list of music-related deaths in 2005. Well known names are on the list (Lou Rawls, Link Wray, Robert Moog) but more relatively known ones such composer Robert Wright, Chet Helms (Janis Joplin' promoter), and Afgani pop star Nasrat Parsa.

• The NY Times' Deborah Sontag writes about Korean pop star Rain, who has two upcoming shows at Madison Square Garden. Rain says he would like to see an Asian pop star make it in America, so he's practicing his English, studying the culture and preparing an English-language album.

• MP3.com has an interview with David Pakman, CEO of online music store eMusic. It's a good, revealing discussion of eMusic's place in the online market. Pakman is very optimistic on the company's future. "We want to be at millions of subscribers and we want to sell more independent music in the world than anyone else," he said. "And I think we're very close to that." Later, he commented on eMusic's lack of DRM. "We'll continue to be no-DRM, not for philosophical reasons but only for practical, compatibility reasons. And if that whole practical, compatibility thing got sorted out, if you could sell DRM-protected music that was interoperable everywhere and that wasn't sort of penalizing customers for buying music digitally, we would do that."