Anyone who has been keeping an eye on the Glastonbury 2011 Band Tracker, which the Guardian put together using the Musicmetric API, will have noticed that rather like the top of the Football Premiership, the top 5 has been rendered virtually impenetrable by the big names. Led by Beyoncé, who ‘shall not be moved’ from the number 1 spot, the top 5 also includes Ke$ha, Coldplay, Jessie J and U2.

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) claimed the digital album ‘came of age’ last year. According to its statistics, 21m digital albums were sold in 2010, representing 17.5% of all album sales and a growth of 30.6% on 2009’s figures. However, this failed to halt the decline of combined sales of digital and physical albums, which they say fell by 7%. This decline is largely the result of increasing numbers of illegal downloads, which reached record levels and amounted to three-quarters of all downloads last year, according to a study carried out on behalf of the BPI.

One way to discourage music piracy is to use creative marketing strategies to heighten the experience and the enjoyment of acquiring music legally. The Kaiser Chiefs, whose new album The Future Is Medieval was released digitally earlier this month, have done just that.

Beatles fans across the globe had reason for celebration last month as Apple announced the release of some of the Fab Four’s most popular tracks on iTunes. In the first week more than 450,000 albums and 2 million individual songs were sold proving the band’s popularity shows no sign of fading. The publicity may have now faded, but a quick look at the stats show that the announcement also played an interesting role on activity and traffic to the bands online profile.

If Facebook has it their way music fans will be a thing of the past.

Allow me to elaborate, if I may…

When Facebook announced their new social plug-ins I was mildly interested, I could now “Like” a band instead of “Become a Fan” not that much of a difference I thought.

I was wrong…