Music

Rhapsody America, the Web's top subscription-based music service, plans to open a digital download store today, becoming the latest company to challenge the dominance of Apple Inc.'s iTunes. Like other recent challengers -- and unlike iTunes -- the Rhapsody MP3 store will feature songs that aren't constrained by anti-copying measures. The four major record labels will provide Rhapsody such songs, which work on any digital music player and can be copied an unlimited number of times.

For years, broadcaster Harry Caray waved his microphone out of the booth to lead White Sox and Cubs fans in the singing of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," a tradition still carried on at Wrigley Field with celebrity conductors. This year, the song turns 100, but it's just one of many that have become a part of the American sports soundtrack. Here are some others that are required listening, whether fans like it or not.

On NEW YEAR'S Day of 1993, fans of cutting-edge music could have done worse than hanging out with Gary Richards on his 22nd birthday as he rode a roller coaster high above Knott's Berry Farm. Richards was throwing a party for himself, but more important, he was pulling rave culture and techno music out of illicit warehouses and injecting it into the concert-going mainstream, drawing a crowd 17,000 strong to his K-Rave '93 at the Orange County amusement park.

IN COUNTLESS spa treatment rooms, therapists knead muscles and array rocks on chakras to the sound of tinkling chimes, muffled chants and meandering guitars. The person lying under the sheets likely will emerge from the treatment calm and relaxed, still smelling the scented massage lotions, but with virtually no recollection of the music wafting through the room. And some would say that's a blessing.

In China, Baidu is the powerhouse, the "it" girl, the search engine to beat. It's a treasure trove of music, most of it illegal. But Google Inc. may have found a way to increase its market share there -- by offering free music legally. The U.S. search giant launched a beta version of a Chinese music service called Music Onebox, which is available only in China at www.google.cn.

Most Southland music fans know McCabe's Guitar Shop for the innumerable folk, country, blues, jazz and world-music concerts presented over the decades in the tiny back stockroom that can hold about 150 folding chairs when all the instrument cases are shoved out of the way. But in 1958, Gerald McCabe opened the doors on Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica intending to focus on furniture design and restoration.

Ken Gibson can tell you that it's a little eerie to hear the "William Tell" overture float through your bedroom window at 2 in the morning. He first thought the noise was a neighbor playing a xylophone. His neighbor was convinced it was a ghost. Across West Avenue K in Lancaster, where the flat brown desert rises up into purple mountains, two others thought the noise was the high school marching band. They all soon learned that the tune was coming from a musical road installed by Honda Motor Co.

Wotan built a house he couldn't afford. Credit was easy; he was a god, after all. He had a particularly wily mortgage broker in Loge, the god of fire, who knew how to manipulate questionable underground funds. The deal went bad. The titans of finance fell, and once the moral levee broke, Valhalla, Wotan's manse, was destroyed by flood. Power was turned over to the people, and gold was returned to anti-speculators who believed in hoarding wealth.

It's been a momentous week. Monday morning at the Music Center, Los Angeles Opera announced a monumental citywide "Ring" festival. As many as 50 organizations around town have expressed willingness to help the company promote its first attempt at Wagner's "Ring of the Nibelung" cycle in 2010.

Early last month, behind the facades of Gower Gulch, that Old West town of Baskin-Robbins, Rite Aid and a Denny's restaurant facing Sunset Boulevard, some 46 vocalists and one showgirl poured into Hollywood Studio Bar and Grill, banding together for a cause the only way they know how -- by unleashing, for more than four hours, tunes about ducks that samba and personalizing the lyrics of "Sixteen Going on Seventeen."