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Album Sales Week of 7/7/09
LMFAO “Party Rock” – 11,482 (37% Physical)
Alchemist “Chemical Warfare” – 7,058
Cage “Depart From Me” – 3,775
Chali 2na “Fish Outta Water” – 1,048
Royce Da 5’9″ “The Revival” – 854 (100% Digital)
D-Block “Poobs Prepare For Glory” – 526
Jay Dee “Dillanthology 2” – 295
Lushlife “Cassette City” – 209
And in industry news this week, we’re going to play, follow the money…
• Valuation of EMI: how much do you want to lose today?
Private equity fund Terra Firma was going to inject $486 million into EMI if Citibank writes off that $4.1 billion in debt. Citi doesn’t want to do that because, well, even to a bank, $4.1 billion is a nice chunk of change. But, they also don’t want to do a new valuation to find out what a better number would be because, well, there aren’t any better numbers… if they revalue the company, it could put EMI in bankruptcy…
• Pandora Gets another $35 million in VC funding
Because $35 million is a lot less than hundreds of millions. This newest injection should be enough to keep the streaming music site going for a little longer. This is actually the first big capital injection I’ve seen in recent months (in the tech/music world), because, well, we’ve kinda been in a recession…
• Grunblatt Replaces Bob Frank as President of E1/Koch
Speaking of capital injections, Koch/E1 just freed up a few cents by laying off Bob Frank as president, and upping Alan Grunblatt
• Rupert Murdoch to restructure myspace as a music portal
After several rounds of layoffs and cutbacks, Rupert Murdoch is going to try to reposition MySpace, which has definitely lost some clout to facebook in the last year or so, as an entertainment portal. I still don’t see how doing this is going to change it to a profitable company, or was he just laying people off for fun?
And now I’m going to leave you with some particularly insightful thoughts from what appears to me to be a great forward-thinking music industry blog…
• How Does Music Get Popular?
• How Can You Capitalize on this? AKA The Future of the Music Biz? (One of the best ideas i’ve seen yet)
I don’t even want to go into an explanation of this piece. But I will (briefly). the idea is that with the way that people consume music now, forget all the marketing ploys and tweets and retweets. Real success comes in harnessing the power of continued listenership. Having an internet radio station is both a filter and an entertainment outlet. I’ll let you get into yourself if you’re interested, but just think about the amount of revenue that could have been generated if you take the combined listenership of Drake, Soulja Boy and Kid Cudi. If those three banded together, and made an exclusive internet radio station, that would be Power, Money & Influence.
Till next time,
Peace
