It's not as dire a situation as medications not showing up on time or hundreds of baby chicks dying in transit, but you can add record stores to the victims of the US Postal Service slowdown. During a summer when mail order sales are the only thing keeping a lot of stores in business, owners are complaining about shipping times that have doubled or tripled and customers who are on edge waiting for that SOUNDGARDEN box set to show up. "It was already s*** [because of Covid-19], and somehow managed to get worse, which is impressive," BRANDON BOGAJEWICZ, owner of mail order company VINYL MOON, told BILLBOARD (paywall). Postmaster General LOUIS DEJOY promised this week to reverse the cutbacks that had become a national scandal, but the music merchants, like many others across the country, remain skeptical. Artists, of course, are victims, too. The CDs and vinyl records in those packages currently crawling through the US mail have a much better profit margin than their streaming counterparts, and they carry a lot more weight toward Billboard chart positions, for whatever that's worth (it's worth a lot to some artists). We vote for our favorite artists through the mail, in a way; at least, we've always had that option. BEN GIBBARD, who's performed several livestreams from home during the pandemic, used his latest one to dedicate a song from his celebrated side project the POSTAL SERVICE to that other Postal Service. The band owes its name to the fact that Gibbard and bandmate JIMMY TAMBORELLO made their only album, 2003's GIVE UP, by sending tracks to each other through the mail (a perfectly safe way to record an album despite what certain politicians might say). And then, as the album was turning into a major indie-pop hit, the mail delivery agency sent a cease-and-desist letter to the band, which resulted, eventually, in a friendly agreement under which the band got to keep the name and the band and the USPS did some cross-promotion, and, unbeknownst to either side at the time, 17 years later the band would do its part to try to save the beleaguered service... Music law brain teaser #1: If a collector buys some old reel-to-reel tapes from a guy who used to work in recording studio that's long ago out of business, and one of them turns out to contain multitrack studio recordings of a '90s rock band of some renown, does the band have a legal claim on the actual tapes?... Music law brain teaser #2: If you co-write a song that not a lot of people hear, and then your co-writer uses exactly one line from that song in another song that many millions of people hear, do you have a legal right to a songwriting credit for that second song? Lengthy discussions and partial answers in the story mix below, or the possum kingdom below, if you will... Shoutout BILLIE EILISH's pit bull, my new favorite Democrat, who emerged from beneath the pop star's keyboard around 2:40 into this performance of "MY FUTURE" Wednesday night at the Democratic National Convention. It was a perfect convention song, by the way, and a really nice performance... THIRD MAN RECORDS is auctioning guitars, amps, pedals and various personal items (chandeliers, anyone?) from the label's and owner JACK WHITE's own collections... RIP DJ SHAY, RON "RONTROSE" HEATHMAN, TODD NANCE and KIMBERLY KENNEDY.