Happy Friday! Here are some things I read this week and wanted to share:

• The Every Child Achieves Act is working its way through Congress. It passed the Senate and will be up for a vote in the House soon. If passed, this bill will ensure that music and arts are part of the core curriculum for elementary schools in the US. Having seen the effects of music education underprivileged students, and having enjoyed the benefits of a solid music education myself, I’m excited about this one.

• My company’s blog has a good explainer this week on high-def music. For anyone interested in more “plain English” information on audio compression, I’ll recommend the book I’m currently reading: Stephen Witt’s How Music Got Free – which contains a surprisingly fascinating background on how the MP3 came about. Basically, a bunch of audio obsessives worked on compression using methods like auditory masking. For their research, one of the songs they listened used as a benchmark was Suzanne Vega’s 1981 song “Tom’s Diner”. The thought of them listening to such an insanely repetitive song repeatedly makes me think of Ravel’s Boléro and Anne Adams’s Unraveling Boléro.

• Speaking of Stephen Witt, he wrote an interesting piece this week on Grooveshark‘s downfall and the sad, mysterious death of its young creator, Josh Greenberg. (Though I will have to disagree with Witt on one point: this field still feels like the wild west at times!)

• Record labels have always served as marketers and tastemakers. In the age of social media marketing, I guess we have nobody but our collective selves to blame for Jack & Jack.