• On the strength of Kanye West and 50 Cent, album sales rose 25% last week...but were still 9% lower than last year. For the year, album sales are down 14%. Sales of digital tracks rose 1% and were only 22% higher than the same week last year. For the year, digital track sales are up 46%.

• Warner Music Group has acquired a 70% stake in Taisuke, a leading artist services company in Japan. Taisuke has management, recorded music and copyright administration aspects and will add to WMG's ability to offer services outside of the traditional recorded music and music publishing areas. (Press release)

• In South Africa, a dispute over ringtone royalties has a pot of money sitting in a trust account. Retailers are refusing to pay more than 5% to composers while the National Organisation for Reproduction Rights in Music in Southern Africa is demanding a new, set amount of 7.5% (which last year replaced a sliding scale royalty last). (Mail & Guardian)

• Commentary on SpiralFrog has been very mixed and mostly negative (no official sample here, just going from the gut) but there may be one definite bright spot to the launch: the quality of its advertisers. AdAge reports that Colgate and Discover Card, and Ad-Supported Music Central noted ads from the Army (I saw plenty of those during my beta tests), Burger Kings and Johnson & Johnson's Acuvue. (AdAge, via Ad-Supported Music Central)

• Interesting ticket news for you: A Massachusetts judge upheld the state's anti-scalping law (people cannot re-sell a ticket for more than a few dollars over the face value). But just as the rest of the country has eased up on scalping, a state legislature has drafted a bill that would eliminate all restrictions on the resale of tickets by either brokers or individuals. (Ticket News)

• News.com has a Q&A with Pandora founder Tim Westergren. "You can be completely unknown, but because we know what you sound like and do some music analysis on you we can make sure you are heard by people who are likely to enjoy your music. And when we get big enough, we can do it to a large enough audience with the prospect that they can essentially support you. For most bands it's a lot if they can get a 100,000 people to like their music. We can probably find 100,000." (News.com)

• Cal Turner III has bought out the shares of Dualtone Music Group partners Dan Herrington and Scott Robinson. (Music Row)

• FoC Ben Sisario of the New York Times has an article titled "Making a Career After a Monster Hit" that's about James Blunt's attempt to ward off the ol' sophomore slump. "Mr. Blunt made an appeal to Lyor Cohen, the domestic chairman of Atlantic’s parent company, the Warner Music Group, asking him to avoid pushing any single too hard and to emphasize the new album as a whole. Mr. Cohen was sympathetic, but only to a point. 'Ultimately we’re not as romantic,' he said. 'You need to get the impressions at radio to bring attention to it.'" (New York Times)