• The news hit the wires today, though Hits reported it on Saturday (and Coolfer linked to the article on the same day): Warner Music Group's Lyor Cohen canned Paul-Rene Albertini, the former head of Warner Music International. And even though Sony BMG's Andrew Lack has left no doubt in anybody's mind that a television executive may not be the best person to appoint head of a major music company, Cohen went ahead and appointed Patrick Vien, president of NBC Universal's Global Networks Division, to the vacant position. Lack was president and COO of NBC prior to joining Sony BMG in January of 2003, and was head of the NBC News division for the eight years prior.

• One has to wonder what the financial analysts in Linkin Park have to say about the early news on Warner Music Group's quarterly earnings: The company will announce earnings on Tuesday, and is expected to report a profit of 40 cents per share on revenue of $1.09 billion.

• A study has shown that music is chosen more when it's popular. Listeners were split into two groups. One group selected songs based only on artist and title, then they rated the song. Another group chose from the same group of songs but also saw the popularity of each song -- a social influence aspect that the first group lacked. The result: The social influence group picked the popular songs more often. The study also found that a song's rating didn't change based on how much the previous group liked or disliked it. The findings explain why time- and information-challenged listeners gravitate toward what is popular and what is recommended to them. "People are faced with too many options, in this case 48 songs. Since you can't listen to all of them, a natural shortcut is to listen to what other people are listening to," said Matthew Salganik, the study's co-author. "I think that's what happens in the real world where there's a tremendous overload of songs." (Live Science, via The Morning News)

• Properly Chilled is a website for "downtempo music and culture." And here I was thinking the word chilled had lost all respectability two or three years ago. (Via Metafilter)

• Those of you who think James Blunt's music is bland should check out his iTunes celebrity playlist.