WINNER OF THE WEEK: Usher. In its first week out, the hunky R&B/pop veteran's Looking 4 Myself album hit Number One and sold 128,000 copies.
Madonna scored her eighth number-one on the Billboard Top 200 album chart with her latest release, "MDNA."
Madonna insults hydrangeas and flower lovers counterattack. CNN's Jeanne Moos reports.
When an album reaches the top of the Billboard 200 in its first week, there's only One Direction it can go.
With nothing more than a piano, a little black dress and a microphone, Adele rouses crowds using her emotions and her voice.
The times they are a-changin'. For the first time in history, digital music sales topped the physical sale of music.
Jay-Z's sixth album, "The Blueprint," hit record stores on the fateful morning of September 11, 2001.
Singer Amy Winehouse's untimely death sparked a whole lot of "Rehab" this past week.
After a decade of declining sales, Adele and Lady Gaga have led the record industry to the first increase in overall record sales since 2004.
It's been a long and winding road, but Apple finally began selling Beatles songs on iTunes on Tuesday.
Sara Bareilles claimed the number one spot on the Billboard 200 as her second album, "Kaleidoscope Heart," moved 90,000 copies in its debut week to grab the top spot. Bareilles' first major label album, 2007's "Little Voice," entered the charts at number 45, selling only 16,000 copies, but built to platinum status from there.
Despite a flurry of Top 10 debuts, Eminem's "Recovery" sold another 116,000 copies to claim No. 1 for the seventh week, Billboard reports.
Two months after Apple edged past Microsoft to become the world's most valuable tech company, it's approaching another milestone: Apple's quarterly sales could top Microsoft's, for the first time ever.
If you think the musical compact disc is dying or dead, you're probably younger than it is.
If you watched the Grammy Awards Sunday night, it would appear all is well in the recording industry. But at the end of last year, the music business was worth half of what it was ten years ago and the decline doesn't look like it will be slowing anytime soon.
Spain's answer to Susan Boyle took to the stage in a national talent show and produced a jaw-dropping display of athletic ability to win the competition.
Susan Boyle's dreams continue to come true. The singing sensation who emerged from obscurity on "Britain's Got Talent" is topping the charts, selling the most albums of any artist in a single week this year with the largest ever sales debut for a female artist.
Cyber-pirates in France may soon face huge fines, an Internet ban and even jail time. CNN's Errol Barnett explains.
French lawmakers passed a tough new measure to crack down on illegal downloading.
CNN's Eunice Yoon and Kevin Voigt talk about why the Beatles mean so much to the music industry.
Free downloads nearly killed the record business. A generation of youthful customers got used to the idea that music should be given away. Compact disc sales fell around 15% annually year after year.
Michael Jackson's music sales keep soaring as fans purchased more than 800,000 of his albums last week, Billboard magazine said.
In his compact New York City office, Anthology Recordings owner Keith Abrahamsson sits at his computer examining a list of recent customers. It seems that Monika from Denmark just spent $29.94 on three albums from his label, including Inside the Shadow by Anonymous. "That's an amazing record," he says, nodding approvingly. "I feel honored to work with a record like that."
Watch a portion of Metallica's performance at SXSW.
CD sales are down. Digital hasn't caught up. Record companies are consolidating. New bands are trying to find their own way.
"I'm having a vision of the near future.
Myspace founders Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson have had an uneasy relationship with the music industry. Nearly every music act has a MySpace page; some of them, like British pop diva Lily Allen and American psychedelic-funk purveyor Gnarls Barkley, have used the social network to become stars. But two years ago Universal Music Group discovered unauthorized songs from U2 and Jay-Z on MySpace and sued the site in federal court.
Until recently, Elio Leoni-Sceti spent his days thinking about how to get consumers to buy more Mop & Glo. Now he has to sell them more Coldplay albums.
"This is awesome. Thank you so much," the country star says of her surprise plaque
Far be it for any mortal to tell Steve Jobs how to flog his world-beating iPod music machine, but here's one humble suggestion: consider reviving the old Pantene Shampoo slogan: "Don't hate me because I'm beautiful."
Gary Scotti has his good weeks and his bad weeks. Lately, there have been more of the latter. The owner of Scotti's Record Shops, the nation's oldest independent record store chain, has been whipsawed by the changes in the music industry.
Starbucks Corp. plans to give away 50 million free digital songs to customers in all of its domestic coffee houses to promote a new wireless iTunes music service that's about to debut in select markets.
It was August 17, 1982, and row upon row of palm-sized plates with a rainbow sheen began rolling off an assembly line near Hanover, Germany.
Warner Music Group on Tuesday posted a quarterly loss that was wider than expected as the company contends with rapidly dropping music sales.
When legendary rock band The Police reunite to kick off the Grammy Awards telecast on February 11, their performance will highlight the best and worst things that the music industry has going for it.
The music business is in a funk. Everybody knows that.
When a European court last week voted to annul the 2004 marriage that created Sony BMG out of the music divisions of Sony and Germany's Bertelsmann, investors quickly concluded that the ongoing courtship between Warner Music Group and Britain's EMI would never happen. Warner's stock sold off 16 percent on the news.
The chances of a deal between Warner Music Group and EMI Group happening anytime soon took a serious blow Thursday morning.
showbuzzupdated: Fri Jun 30 2006 14:46:00
Denzel Washington says he wants Peter Jackson to provide the special effects for a film he plans to direct, a newspaper has reported.
People have said many damning things to me over the years about Edgar Bronfman Jr. They have called the Seagram heir a rich man's son who steered his family liquor business into Hollywood so that h...
Apple Computer said that it has renewed contracts with the four largest record companies, ensuring that songs will still be sold at 99 cents each, according to a news report Tuesday.
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - The Arctic Monkeys, Britain's latest "it' band, share a pretty amusing take on the current state of the recording industry in the song "A Certain Romance."
Forget the MTV generation. Today's up-and-coming rock stars are setting their sights on a whole new target audience: the sippy-cup crowd.
CNNMoney: Sweet music?updated: Thu Sep 22 2005 11:20:00
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - These aren't good times for the music industry.
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - The Rolling Stones have fully embraced the digital music bandwagon. Is it time for the Beatles to do the same?
The online store that supplies 99-cent songs for your iPod just celebrated its 300 millionth sale. But a new study suggests that free music downloading is alive and well in the virtual world.
Investors interested in owning the smallest major record label in a struggling music industry got the heads-up on Friday: Warner Music Group Corp. is going public.
The news hit me like a John Bonham bass-drum kick to the gut: Record labels want to raise the wholesale prices of songs on downloading sites like iTunes, Napster, and Yahoo! MusicMatch, according to a report in Monday's Financial Times.
Britain's EMI, the world's third-largest music group, warned on profits Monday following delays in releasing two of its major albums.
The Motion Picture Association of America announced a new campaign aimed at slowing the illegal downloading of movies off the Internet.
FSB: String Theoryupdated: Wed Dec 01 2004 00:01:00
The String Cheese incident is a Boulder-based band known for its extended jazzy improvisations—but there's nothing impulsive about its moneymaking methods. During 11 years of nonstop touring, the f...
The Motion Picture Association of America is set to follow the lead of the music industry and start filing lawsuits against individuals who it charges are illegally trading digital copies of movies, according to a published report.
For tens of millions of people listening to digital music, there is no going back.
Music CDs may not be headed the way of Betamax videotapes after all -- at least not yet.
You can forgive the chaotic, run-down atmosphere when you walk into Tower Records on Broadway and West Fourth Street in Manhattan. You don't even mind all those SpongeBob action figures and Beatles...
Just when almost everybody else is trying to exit the music business, who's rushing in but Edgar Bronfman Jr., who recently joined a team of investors in a successful $2.6 billion bid for Time Warn...
Business 2.0: The MP3 Economyupdated: Sun Jun 01 2003 00:01:00
The going rate for downloading songs from online music services like Apple's ITunes Music Store, MusicNet, Pressplay, and Rhapsody is about $1 a pop. Yet the economics of recorded music sales haven...
Steve Jobs loves music. But as with a lot of geeks in Silicon Valley, his musical tastes are a little retro. He worships Bob Dylan and is the kind of obsessive Beatles fan who can talk your ear o...
It was a party that gossip columnist Liz Smith called "a love-fest, an intimate spectacular." Kid Rock arrived in a silver top hat with Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun. Sex in the City star ...
The music business is trapped in a new-economy time warp. While the rest of us plod through Scandal Summer 2002, record companies are still dealing with "paradigm shifting technologies," talk of ca...
With album sales flagging, digital-piracy issues lingering, and EMI dumping artists, bad news has been in heavy rotation for the recording industry lately. But Big Music has managed one hit: a seri...
On a hot summer evening, dozens of limousines and SUVs ferrying the cream of Parisian society pull up in front of the Pompidou Center, the city's contemporary art complex. Bernard Arnault, chairman...
Back in the early '80s, a shoestring operation called MTV came up with the idea of a cable network that would play rock music videos 24 hours a day. Advertisers yawned. Cable system owners scoffed....
Money Magazine: Top of the Chartsupdated: Thu Mar 01 2001 00:01:00
When we hear "sis-co," most of us at MONEY think about the Internet technology company (Cisco), not the guy who sings the "Thong Song" (Sisqo). But we love music too--and the numbers behind the rec...
It's the Fourth of July in San Francisco, and big John Hummer, co-founder of the venture capital firm Hummer Winblad, is holding court at the Dolphin Club. The club stands out amid the tony tourist...
What do Hootie and the Blowfish have in common with Wal-Mart? Neither is a big fan of mail-order record clubs. The National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM), whose 1,100 members includ...
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