Gartner reports that smartphones made up 19% of all mobile phone sales worldwide in the second quarter of this year. This is an increase of over 50% from a year ago. In many markets, such as the US and Europe, the smartphone percentage is well above 19%. Also, worldwide, there’s a different leader in the list of most popular smartphone platforms than in the US. Here are the top systems worldwide:

While the appetite for music is stronger than ever, a new successful business model for the industry continues to be elusive. Each year, a new favored solution appears...and disappoints. So where is the new successful model going to come from, and can it truly gain enough traction to compensate for the huge decline in physical CD sales?

Full Story HERE.

Cable giant Comcast commissioned a study by International Communications research on cable TV viewing habits. One of the headlines from the study is that 62% of regular primetime TV viewers have watched via time shifting. This is an increase of 60% from the numbers last year and an 80% increase from 3 years ago. Time shifting includes viewing via a DVR, on-demand services or Internet viewing. Comcast said that its subscribers watch more than 350 million hours of VOD each month.

To read the full "Tech Trends" for the week of 8/23/10, click here.

At the recent New Music Seminar, music executives in various parts of the business compared notes on the state of the industry. Some of the more interesting information came from Pandora. The topline data included the facts that the service has surpassed 60 million total listeners in the U.S. and that, of those, Pandora’s CEO, Joe Kennedy said that over 22 million had listened “in the last few days” before the presentation.

The most recent data from the Pew Research Center’s ongoing Internet & Life Project study quantifies the proliferation of multi-tasking mobile devices. The chart below shows the growth in the number of people performing various tasks on their mobile devices between April 2009 and May 2010. Excluding the devices original purpose – making phone calls – here are the most popular uses and the change in user behavior:

YouTube has added new functionality to its music video service.  New features include music discovery, charts and curated playlists, among others.  The new YouTube Music landing page is an attempt to get away from the hodge-podge approach to discovering new music and give users more direction in finding everything from the most popular videos to unsigned acts.  In the near future they also expect to add a list of concerts as part of an “Events Near You” feature.

To read the full "Tech Trends" for the week of 8/2/10, click here.

Check out our Music Preview for August, featuring:

• Usher
• Marina & The Diamonds
• The Rescues
• Jerrod Niemann
• Sara Bareilles
• And more!

To see the whole preview, click here.

As music is increasingly experienced on the internet, whether it be downloaded or streamed, audio or video, a way to track and compile an artist’s presence and popularity both on and off the web has never been fully realized… until now. Big Champagne has developed what they have dubbed “The Ultimate Chart,” a list of the top 100 songs (and 100 artists) based on data from not only iTunes and Amazon, but MySpace, YouTube, Yahoo!, AOL, Facebook, and Twitter, just to name a few. CEO Eric Garland explained, "The Ultimate Chart examines music sales and radio airplay and the access to music, and socializing around music, that are growing much faster. We're rewriting the top of the charts for the new music business and enlisting the help of its chief architects to surface the most popular music that the charts have overlooked." It is our pleasure to bring you The Ultimate Chart’s Top Ten songs of the week in every new edition of “Tech Trends.”

Foursquare, the leading location-based mobile social networking site, has shown impressive growth over the last year. Usage now tops 1.6 million in the US. Foursquare applications are available for the iPhone, Blackberry, Android and Windows Mobile. Users can check in from various sites to let their friends know where they are and what they’re doing. In the process users earn badges and mayorships. 

Online streaming is the wave of the future for all types of media, from music in the cloud to streaming video services. Netflix, a company which has built a great business on old-fashioned physical media…not to mention snail mail, sees its own business moving in this direction at an accelerated rate.