Billboard Shifts Website to Lure Listeners, Buyers

It's the biggest seller in 5 years

(NEWSER) - Nice week for Taylor Swift: Her Speak Now album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts, racking up 1,047,000 sales. (That includes iTunes and the like.) Billboard rounds up some of the milestones:

• It's the biggest single sales week for an album since 50 Cent's The Massacre sold 1,141,000 in 2005. (And the LA Times notes that Swift's feat may be more impressive given the state of the music industry.)

The over-40 set is the mainstay of album sales

(NEWSER) - These days, if you want to sell CDs, you're best off targeting the over-40 crowd. In a bizarre twist on music industry logic, older buyers have become a relatively potent force in music sales. The reason: "Adults don’t steal, because we don’t know how to," one older music producer tells the Boston Globe . “We're still married to the concept of ‘put the CD in the car, put the CD in the library.’" More»

She has strongest US sales week of 2009; best female debut ever

(NEWSER) - Susan Boyle’s Dream has become very real in the US, where her debut album has opened atop the Billboard 200 chart. I Dreamed a Dream sold 701,000 copies, the best sales week for any release this year in the US. Eminem's Relapse previously held the 2009 mark at 608,000. As far as debut albums goes, Boyle's opening week trails only Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle in 1993, which sold 803,000 copies. She now has the record for a female artist. More»

Free All Music is innovative, but still might not work

(NEWSER) - A new site thinks it has the answer the music industry’s woes: Free All Music will allow users to download a high-quality mp3 with no copy restrictions in exchange for watching a 15-second video ad of their choosing. The site then takes a user’s handle and uses it to produce another ad, for third-party sites, that announces what the user downloaded and who sponsored it. Users may download 15 mp3s a month—and perhaps more if Free All Music eventually sells more sponsorships. More»

Album sales up 90% from first week

(NEWSER) - Michael Jackson is still dominating the Billboard charts, with his solo albums selling 800,000 copies in the first full week after his death and 2.2 million songs downloaded. His Number Ones collection is the top-selling album in the US as well as No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Comprehensive Albums chart, with Thriller coming in second. More»