Twitter has become a popular social networking tool among artists and celebrities. The more twitter followers you have apparently increases your worth especially among advertisers looking to push a product. Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber each have close 30 million twitter followers, but how many of them are real?

Almost 70% of Lady Gaga’s twitter followers are fake according to Status People who devised a software tool that divides followers into three categories – the fake, the inactive and the good.

“Katy Perry, Rihanna and Britney Spears each have follower counts in the region of 20million. But Status People’s software suggest that a large proportion of those followers may be imaginary tweeters. Company executive Rob Waller told the Observer: ‘A fake account is set up to follow people or send out spam. They normally have no followers, but follow large numbers of people. ‘An inactive account is one in which there has been no activity for a while. They could be real people, but we would describe them as consumers of information rather than sharers of information.” (Mail Online)

“The tool is intended to expose the true scale of the problem, and it matters because the number of followers a person has can be translated into financial worth by advertisers and marketing companies.”

Both Green Day and No Doubt will release their anticipated albums and are expected to sell 125-150k in the first week. Each band has sold millions of records through out their career, but they are facing new challenges with an aging fan base, music piracy, and of course changing trends. Although, Green Day and No Doubt updated their sound, still the first singles are sluggish sales wise receiving mixed results from long time fans. It wouldn’t surprise me if each band struggles to sell 500,000 units. One Direction is the only artist this year to surpass one million in sales.

Florence and the Machine’s Spectrum was the most-streamed song in the UK this week. But, what does this mean?

“It means streaming music is the fastest-growing sector of the industry, overtaking downloads, which are due to see an increase of 8.5% this year.” Strategy Analytics forecast that spending on digital music – including downloads, streaming music and mobile sales – would overtake that of physical products like CDs in 2015, both in the UK and worldwide. (BBC)

Singer/songwriter Elle Varner who Kings profiled a year ago will land on next week’s Billboard 200 albums chart. “Her debut album “Perfectly Imperfect” should start in the top 10 of the tally as industry sources are projecting it may sell 25,000 to 30,000. That number is about twice as much as some forecasters had initially thought the 23-year old’s set was going to sell.” (Bilboard)

The music business is welcoming Google’s new initiative that updates search algorithms.

Posted on Google:

“Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results. This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily—whether it’s a song previewed on NPR’s music website, a TV show on Hulu or new music streamed from Spotify.

Since we re-booted our copyright removals over two years ago, we’ve been given much more data by copyright owners about infringing content online. In fact, we’re now receiving and processing more copyright removal notices every day than we did in all of 2009—more than 4.3 million URLs in the last 30 days alone. We will now be using this data as a signal in our search rankings.”