According to Nielsen and Billboard’s Mid-year Music Industry Report, overall album sales, digital album sales, catalog album sales and vinyl album sales all saw increases over the same six-month period in 2010.

A recent Nielsen global survey of 26,644 online consumers across 53 countries explored the music industry’s toughest questions: how to optimize marketing and how maximize revenue in a digital and increasingly mobile world.

Performers like Bruce Springsteen who performed at last year’s Super Bowl see significant boosts to album, catalog, and digital sales.

The Nielsen Company revealed the impact that a performance on the Sunday Results programme of the UK series X Factor had on digital download sales (online and mobile), online buzz and radio airplay for the special guest stars promoting a track.

Hit digital albums have lost market share to far less popular titles. But hit digital tracks have gained market share over the years.

In August, women made up 56.1 percent of the Web traffic to music sites. Overall, music sites pulled in 42.5 million unique female visitors in August.

A sold out show or an album going gold, platinum or diamond is music to the ears of emerging artists and veteran musicians alike. But achieving that goal typically takes more than just great songs—exposure is a key contributor.

As Myspace.com continues its strategic move toward becoming an “entertainment portal,” the growth to Myspace Music should help cement their presence in this space. Since the site’s launch in September 2008, unique visitors to the music.myspace.com subdomain have increased 190 percent — growing from 4.2 million unique visitors to 12.1 million in June 2009. Year-over-year traffic to the URL has increased 1,017 percent.
When comparing unique visitors of the music.myspace.com subdomain to other sites within the music category in June, it ranked third behind AOL Music and Yahoo! Music and …

The breaking news of Michael Jackson’s sudden death dominated the web yesterday (and today), causing spikes in traffic and overwhelming social networks such as Twitter and Facebook with bursts of information and updates from millions of users. In comparison, discussions of Jackson far exceeded those of the swine flu scare as well as the inauguration of President Obama.

Nielsen Buzzmetrics analysis shows that more than 16% of tweets over the past 24 hours reference Michael Jackson, and less than 2 percent of Tweets mention Farrah Fawcett and Iran.

A Topper of Charts …

Nielsen has issued a year-end look at the most popular trends among Americans during 2008, covering everything from the top TV programs to the most popular consumer packaged goods.
William P. Young’s ”The Shack” was the top-selling fiction book through November 30.
Among non-fiction books, “A New Earth,” by Eckhart Tolle was the top-seller.
The audio version of Tolle’s “A New Earth” was the top-selling audio book of the year.