The Top of the Heap: The music biz is treating Leona Lewis very nicely. She has debuted at No. 1 on this week’s U.S. pop chart, selling 205,000 copies of her Syco/J Records debut, “Spirit” and has become the first British solo artist to ever debut atop the Billboard charts.

New Music: The Austin alternative band, Dawn Over Zero has posted a new track titled Circulation which was produced by Matt Novesky of Blue October. Listen to Circulation as well.

Musical Chairs: Nick Gatfield who has just stepped down as president of Island Records UK, will take the position as head of A&R at EMI for North America and the UK.

War on Piracy: The Pirate Bay, the illegal file sharing site is threatening to seek damages from music industry lobby group The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) for blocking access to its website.

A Mega-Star in the Making: Miley Cyrus who is only 15 years old earned herself $18.2 million last year. Plus, we like her sense of humor because she found Madonna’s 4 minutes song silly which shows in this youtube video that can be viewed here.

Fake It Till You Make It: Myspace just makes things to easy for the average joe band. Labels, promoters and music critics use to check a band’s MySpace page to see how many plays they have but they have come to realize (or at least we did) it’s generally a poor indicator in evaluating the overall success of a band.

According to Wired, a company called TuneBoom Pro claims it can artificially inflate MySpace play counts over a thirty day period for any artist, charging on a sliding scale:

$147 for 1K plays
$417 for 5K plays
$747 for 300K plays

A TuneBoom Pro representative said they even have worked exclusively for the majors up until about a year ago when we offered our services to the independent artist and labels. This isn’t suprising because everybody at one point thought the number of Myspace plays held some type of value but everybody came to the realization that it doesn’t contribute to the overall bottom line. If a relatively unknown artist is getting over 10k plays a day on a consistent basis, then its worth checking into for sure. At the end of the day, it all comes down to GREAT songs….

PluggedIn: Will Smith and his entertainment company called Overbrook Entertainment has unveiled a music video site called PluggedIn featuring thousands of videos from EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and indies. Users can create their own personal profile pages on PluggedIn, but these videos cannot be embedded on outside sites.