— The CMT Awards show resulted in sales bumps for winning and featured artists. Three-trophy winner Brad Paisley got a 72% increase for his song “Waitin’ On A Woman” and his album “Play” jumped 52%. Percent increases, however, don’t amount to much when sales are tiny. “Waitin’ On A Woman” moved only 2,000 units a week earlier, and his album Play moved a mere 2,000 units after the spike. In terms of unit increases, the ones that represent revenue gained, Zac Brown Band is an example of a good sales increase. The 31% jump by “Chicken Fried” represented an increase of about 6,000 units and the 38% jump for “The Foundation” album was an increase of 8,000 units. Collectively, the top 75 country albums increased 21%, according to Nielsen SoundScan. (Music Row)
— Hitwise says Twitter is great at driving traffic to entertainment sites but not nearly as strong at driving transactions. “However, with one or two exceptions (most notably Dell, which claims to generated $3m via Twitter), very few transactional websites have yet used Twitter to drive sales. During May, Google UK sent 365 times more traffic to transactional websites than Twitter.” (Hitwise)
— Engadget has a video hands-on video of the upcoming Zune HD. It’s very brief but gives a good picture of the interface and hardware design. (Engadget)
— The Local Radio Freedom Act, the bill opposing terrestrial radio performance royalties, has gained ten more supporters. The total is up to 237 members of the House. The Performance Rights Act, which if passed will impose performance royalties on the use of sound recordings, passed the House Judiciary Committee last month. No hearings have yet been set for the Senate. (Radio Ink)
— FriendFeed has added the ability to share MP3 files (up to three a day per user). (TechCrunch)
