album sales

Starting with the topic of Atlantic's "artificial scarcity" experiment with Estelle's album Shine, the LA Times' Jon Healey veers off into a thought-provoking post on pricing, demand and digital downloads.

The above chart shows the percent increase/decrease in album sales in each week of 2008 versus the same week in 2007. It's obvious most of the curve is below zero, but the thing I have seen lately is that the trend is upward in the second half of the year.

Last week The Wall Street Journal ran an article on some artists' and labels' dissatisfaction with single track sales on iTunes hampering album sales. Kid Rock, for instance, doesn't offer most of his albums at digital stores.

In a post yesterday, I took issue with a quote in The Wall Street Journal by analyst Aram Sinnreich that said albums were on their last gasp. Aram emailed to me some comments and I am posting them here.

The Wall Street Journal's Ethan Smith and Nick Wingfield have a very good article about some artists' and labels' unhappiness with the weak economic realities of a la carte downloads.

Stars from all over Music City came together with friends and family of Alan Jackson on Wednesday night to help him celebrate a remarkable career. Alan just recently surpassed the 50-million mark in album sales .. something that only six...

I was surprised when I read that a Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst lowered Warner Music Group's 12-month target price to $7 from $9. The lower target isn't a surprise, but the timing is curious...because it's so late.

Nielsen Soundscan has released a mid-year update on recorded music sales (taken from this Billboard.biz article, which has many different numbers than Variety's article...possibly different accounting for

The Age has a good primer for the upcoming wave of "free is good" marketing advice. Chris Anderson (author of "The Long Tail") offered a preview of his upcoming book (out early 2009), and The Age article gives a lot of ink to Anderson.

• Usher's Here I Stand debuted at #1 on the album chart with sales of 433,000, less than half of the debut week of his 2004 smash, Confessions. At 7.24 million units, album sales were down 13% versus last year. (Billboard.biz)