Coolfer

Interesting post by Echo's Mark Montgomery about his dinner with Topspin's Ian Rogers. Less on the actual meeting and more on strategies and the evolution of the business. A sample:

From The Deal's Tech Confidential:

I see a few big problems with the rollout of Nokia's Comes With Music. First, as I mentioned earlier, there were reports today that the initial Nokia handset to offer Comes With Music, the 5130, will not offer over-the-air downloads. The service works only with pay-as-you-go plans.

Selling Radiohead's OK Computer for $1.99, as Amazon.com is doing, strikes me as a good way to combat free.

• British retailer HMV reported improved revenues in its most recent quarter. Music sales were down 7% as the company increased its emphasis on video games. (Bloomberg)

In the early part of the decade, many people thought Metallica was doomed. But Metallica's activism against the original Napster has not harmed its career. Its decision to keep its songs off iTunes for many years has not harmed its career.

I've spent some time going through SoundUnwound, the new Wikipedia-like music encyclopedia created by IMDb and Amazon.com. The site allows users to create and edit pages for artists, albums songs and labels (you can log in with your Amazon.com user ID and password).

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.

• Slipknot debuted at the top of the album chart with sales of 239,516 of All Hope Is Gone. The Game's LAX took second with sales of 238,382 units. Sales were up 2.3% from the previous week and were down 6.5% from the same week last year. (Billboard.biz)

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.