E-Commerce

It's been nearly a month since the British rock band Radiohead shook the music industry by releasing an entire album on its Web site and allowing fans to pay whatever they wanted, down to and including nothing, to download and own the music forever. Now, the preliminary sales results are in, as tabu...

What are customers around the world saying about the new booming Middle Eastern brands? What are they reading in the brand names? Which ones are they loving and talking about? Which ones can they pronounce, type and remember easily? Are these new local brands leading the charge for global mindshare ...

The holiday season may still be more than a month away, but you can be sure marketers and retailers already have visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads. Consumers are expected to spend roughly $48 billion on consumer electronics in the fourth quarter, for example, and almost half of that -- $...

At a hearing before the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and General Counsel Michael Callahan were forced to defend Yahoo's testimony last year regarding its role in the Chinese government's arrest and jailing of journalist Shi Tao. The executives were called on ...

The 12,000 members of the Writers Guild of America hit the picket lines Monday after talks with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers failed to reach a compromise. At issue are new allocation plans for DVD and digital download residuals. It is the first strike since writers walked ...

As the Internet and digital technologies continue to play an ever-increasing role on the business side of the music industry, big-name recording artists have begun to turn their backs on their labels and opt instead to strike out on their own. Part 1 of this two-part series described what longstandi...

The two leading social networking sites -- Facebook and News Corp.'s MySpace -- are both launching advertising programs this week aimed at allowing marketers to tightly target their audiences by using information from user profiles and other data. MySpace announced the pending launch of "SelfServe b...

CreditCards.com, a Web-based distributor of credit cards to consumers, hopes to raise as much as $185 million through an initial public offering, the company said Friday. The Austin, Texas-based firm still does not have a firm date for its offering, first announced in August, but in a filing with th...

TV and movie writers in the Writers Guild of America are expected to hit the picket lines as early as Monday after failing to reach agreements with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. The two factions are waging a pitched battle over DVD and digital distribution residuals, a gro...

As the Federal Trade Commission geared up for its Town Hall meeting at the end of this week focusing on electronic behavioral marketing techniques, privacy advocates banded together to urge the agency to give consumers a way to opt out. Specifically, nine privacy organizations have requested that th...

Viacom, which has invested heavily to expand its footprint on the Web, said its "Transformers" movie franchise and the sale of its music publishing business helped it record an 80 percent jump in third-quarter earnings. Viacom earned $641.6 million, up 80 percent when compared with $356.8 million a ...

In the shadow of the towering Hollywood sign, executives in the film, TV, music, telecom, Internet and technology industries are convening this week to compare notes on a new starlet: the tech-savvy consumer. Digital Hollywood conference attendees are crowding the hallways, ballroom and meeting room...

Online retail sales in the United States jumped 23 percent, to US$28.4 billion, during the third quarter of this year compared with the same July-September period in 2006. The retail surge was led by sales of video games, consoles and accessories, which showed a year-to-year increase of 199 percent,...

October seemed as though it would be a banner month for the recording industry after a Minnesota jury ruled in favor of the Recording Industry Association of America in the first peer-to-peer file sharing lawsuit to go to trial. The jurors demanded Jammie Thomas, a single mother who the RIAA claimed...

NBC Universal and News Corp. have launched a beta version of Hulu, an advertising-driven Web site where users can view for free television shows, clips and movies. Currently available only to those who are invited after sending in applications, Hulu is presenting full-length versions of hit programs...