1. Remember how I said in every spring post that Spotify was coming to the US and it never came? Well, wouldn’t you know it, while WAYM was away, Spotify finally draped itself in the Stars and Stripes! Not surprisingly, Spotify has started out strong, is on track for its very first profit, and could pose a threat to iTunes. Meanwhile, Pandora says Spotify’s launch hasn’t affected its service, which despite posting losses is growing in revenue, and Pandora’s ad rate potential is even getting into traditional radio territory.

2. Lots of lawsuit and negotiation news in the music biz lately, including a Village People singer suing for copyright credit, artists like Bruce Springsteen getting a shot at reclaiming ownership of recordings from labels, music publishers dropping a suit against YouTube, and AFTRA working on a new contract with labels. The most potentially impactful case for the future of music services came down last week, when a judge ruled in favor of EMI and against the online service MP3tunes but at the same time affirmed the legal foundation for music locker services like the ones Google and Amazon are fostering. The judge decided these services don’t violate copyrights, but Peter Kafka says this mainly keeps the status quo for consumers. If you want to see status that is not quo, check out this pie chart animation of recording industry revenue from 1980 to 2010.

3. Another big event WAYM missed on hiatus was the new Netflix plans, and despite a lot of grumbling from consumers, James McQuivey says Netflix is still doing fine. Additional developments at Netflix include a kids’ section, rumors of a VOD rental option, and future expansion into Britain and Spain, a country which others have stayed out of because of struggles with piracy. We know DVD sales are plunging, but digital downloads and rentals aren’t doing so hot either. Amazon is touting new digital movie deals, but Wal-Mart’s Vudu has zipped past it in market share, and Miramax is trying out Facebook, which is now ranked third as an online video destination.

4. The lineup for the Toronto Film Festival, which runs from Sept 8-18, has been released, and indieWire highlights some of the surprises among films that won’t be there. This summer’s specialty hits included Midnight in Paris and Senna, while The Worst Movie EVER! turned out to have the most prescient title ever, at least box office-wise. Unfortunately the economy doesn’t bode well for indie filmmakers, so the Weinsteins are looking to Broadway to make more money, and you can check record stores (if they still exist in your area) to find David Lynch.

5. A Disney executive admitted that studios don’t care at all about story when it comes to tentpole films, which makes it extra hilarious that Disney’s Lone Ranger reboot with Johnny Depp has been shut down because of a sky-rocketing budget. Same deal with Universal’s Ouija Board film. Just a thought: Maybe shooting for a good story would be cheaper. If those projects get cranked back up again, the writers might want to consult Sean Hood’s essay about what it feels like to have your film flop at the box office. And apparently the Chinese don’t care about story either, because Hollywood is really making a push into that market.

6. According to Nielsen stats, older people are increasingly using tablets and eReaders. That has to be good news for Reader’s Digest, which is now on the iPad. It’d be great if the olds would read digital comics too, which are now available via a digital storefront initiative. While some fear that the book’s days are numbered, Paul Carr argues that eBooks are helping to make this a Golden Era of books, and he also doesn’t see books suffering from piracy issues. eBooks may suffer from over-pricing issues, though, as a class-action lawsuit against Apple claims. But if you want to over-pay for good old-fashioned magazines, there are plenty still on shelves.

7. Big computing news in HP dropping out of the tablet business, which led to a TouchPad fire sale. Plus HP might spin off its PC business, which Erica Ogg sees as a sign we’re at the end of the PC era, and others see as a sign that HP is a poorly-run company. Most companies involved in mobile device manufacturing are busy suing each other over patents, while mobile phone users are busy texting and picture-taking, and nearly a third of young adults are busy pretending to have phone conversations so as to avoid talking to nearby humans.

8. Google+ is the new social media service on the scene, which Facebook claims not be worried about, especially since it saw record traffic in July. Some say Facebook really should be worried, as it’s in danger of losing even more rich suburban parents. At least it’s got the millionaires over Twitter, and the celebrities still haven’t found Google+ yet, but all social media still has about 50% of America yet to get on board for anything. Just don’t ask all of Germany to get on board with the “Like” button.

9. Video game sales were way down this summer, with July bringing the lowest sales numbers in nearly five years. Sales are about to get even worse at GameStop, which has angered some consumers by yanking a coupon from sealed game boxes after determining it favored a competitor. And a planned videogame museum is on the ropes. At least Xbox Live seems to be doing well, and Angry Birds is headed for 1 billion downloads and even better gameplay.

10. Some of the finer News for TV Majors (@N4TVM) links from the past two weeks: Louie’s Magic, RIP iTunes TV Rentals, Summer Viewing Up, TV Ad Problems, British Timeshifting, Fox Defending Wall, TWC Uses Slingbox, Shorter Seasons, Doctrine Gone, State of Network TV, Future Trends, Real Housewives Tragedy, Google Buys Motorola Mobility, Breaking Bad Renewed/Ending.

1. Twitter’s bidding value has reached $4 billion, pretty good for a service whose purpose its own CEO can’t even pinpoint. Another Twitter exec said there are no plans to parlay Twitter into a news network, but Mathew Ingram says in some senses it already is one (and have you watched CNN?), as is social media in general. Twitter can also be used to crowdsource a story for Tim Burton.

2. We’re finally (hopefully) done with two long, drawn-out movie studio stories: Disney has sold Miramax to Filmyard Holdings, and MGM can now officially relaunch itself anew. But we’re not yet done with the long, drawn-out story of who will take over the MPAA. For a time it was said to be Democratic politician Bob Kerrey; now the name is Republican politician Tom Davis. And we’re not sure what the future of the British film industry will be without the long, drawn-out Harry Potter series to rely on.

3. Awards season is shifting into middle gear: Winter’s Bone is really cleaning up, winning at the Gotham Awards and the Torino Film Festival and leading the Independent Spirit Award nominations, which also had a few surprises; the National Board of Review liked The Social Network best; Sundance has announced its competitive slate (and the out of competition fare); the Academy has released the animated and live-action short Oscar nomination shortlist; and Roman Polanski accepted a Best Director award from the European Film Awards via Skype.

4. Blockbuster is hoping a new ad campaign (“We’re not closed yet!”) and a new pricing scheme (“Hopefully you’ll return this late!”) will rescue it. In contrast, the only thing rising faster than Netflix is the volume of articles on the rise of Netflix, which leads David Poland to offer his familiar “Wait a minute” perspective, while Dian L. Chu wonders if a crash is possible, and Paul Carr wonders why the studios don’t like Netflix more.

5. Wii console sales have declined precipitously; at the Xbox’s 5^th birthday mark, there are no new consoles on the horizon; and Disney is shifting attention from console to online and mobile games. And why not, with games like Angry Birds garnering lots of money and new addicts.

6. Hard to keep track of all the piracy and copyright news lately: The US government has shut down over 80 websites suspected of piracy, Fox has gone after an online script trader, Viacom is appealing the YouTube case, Pirate Bay lost an appeal, prosecutors dropped a case against an Xbox hacker, the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal by a 16-year-old illegal downloader, Google will try out new anti-piracy measures (which make Greg Sandoval wonder which side Google is on now, Team Copyright Owner or Team User), and China (Team China) is fighting intellectual-property abuse.

7. Google’s looking to make a library distribution deal with Miramax, part of a larger plan to feature more long-form content on YouTube. Google’s plan to acquire Groupon fell through, though, ending an already tough week that saw the company investigated for antitrust allegations by the European Union and having to respond to criticism that it helps corrupt businesses. But hey, at least it’s not MySpace.

8. A UK court ruled that paid news aggregator services have to pay newspapers when those services feature newspapers’ online content, even just headlines and short extracts, which could have significant implications (though the ruling will be appealed, of course). Something like Google News (and WAYM!) is ok because it’s free and ad-supported, not subscription-based.

9. Half of the Grammy nominations went to indie artists and labels, but Leonard Pierce says it’s more complicated than that. Spotify took a big financial loss last year, but Bruce Houghton says it’s more complicated than that. Fergie won a Billboard Woman of the Year Award; I wish it was more complicated than that.

10. Good News for TV Majors links from the past two weeks: Ad Volume Standards, The Netflix Challenge, DirecTV May Drop Channels, Walking Dead Closes Writers’ Room, Copps Criticizes Media, Good TVeets (#liesshowrunnerstellyou edition), Terriers Coverage, US Worried About Rep on Canadian TV, Net Neutrality Vote, Comcast Dispute, Attention Span Issue.

1. James Poniewozik describes the literary and political joys of satirical Twitter accounts, such as @BPGlobalPR, whose anonymous editor has brilliantly skewered corporate-speak. Such must-reads have helped Twitter as a company, which in the past six months has doubled its staff and its collection of cool office doodads. It’s also growing fast as a video source, though it has irked some by banishing third-party ad networks. Finally, HubSpot has just about every Twitter infographic you could ever want or even imagine.

2. Things were much calmer for Facebook this fortnight as CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a few privacy changes (and placated Pakistan), but Pete Cashmore says the privacy war is far from over. The Quit Facebook Day didn’t see too many quit Facebook, but Tom Spring says it’s the negative PR that really mattered, not the quitting. Facebook is still comfortably atop Google’s list of most-visited sites and is still the most popular i-Phone app, but Collin Douma gives us a glimpse at the next Facebook freakout coming: the prospect of Facebook charging for use.

3. Good news/bad news for Apple: The Department of Justice is investigating the anti-competitive practices of iTunes and possibly more, but Apple finally toppled Microsoft for the title of most valuable technology company. Cutting it down the middle, Reid Rosefelt says CEO Steve Jobs is just like Kim Jong-il but in a sort of good way. Plus, Jobs says he’s got the answer for saving the media business; I’m betting Kim Jong-il doesn’t. I also bet Kim never inspired the creation of a dating site.

4. Nicholas Carr says we need to stop dropping hyperlinks into sentences (um…darn), but Scott Berkun proposes a few counter-arguments (yay!). Speaking of links, it’s looking like Digg is dying. And as far as the blogosphere, Frederic Lardinois offers a few infographics detailing the demographics of bloggers; nearly 30% reside in the U.S., and the gender split is even. And as far as other stories related to the internet that I wanted to fit in somewhere, Sarah Lacey reports on how a Southeast Asian newspaper is dealing with the digital revolution, Ryan Chittum describes how the online paywall helps out the print Irish Times, and Pepsi says they plan to turn much more to social media marketing than traditional methods of advertising.

5. One study says that 4% of video gamers qualify as extreme, which means they play upwards of 50 hours a week; the average is 13 hours. I personally spent a good chunk of time playing Google.com’s Pac-Man game last week, but despite the claim that office productivity declined measurably thanks to the game, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry says that without it, we still would have been wasting our time some other way. Maybe we can waste it in better ways: J. Matthew Zoss interviews a pair of game designers about how to build satisfying gameplay around moral issues.

6. A survey indicates that 33% of musicians don’t have health insurance; Nancy Pelosi says health care reform will help. I assume Lady Gaga has the money for good coverage; she said she doesn’t even mind if fans illegally download her music because she makes plenty enough from touring. I bet she’d be bothered if a politician appropriated “Bad Romance” though (insert Mark Souder joke here), and numerous politicians have recently been taken to task, or even court, for using music in their campaigns without proper permission or licensing.

7. A lot of negative Hollywood news: AMC has closed the U.S.’s first-ever megaplex (though some might see that as a positive); theater ticket prices are soaring; May’s tentpoles sunk (and stunk), and Memorial Day weekend was a box office bust (Prince of Persia disappointed, proof for David Cox that video game movies never work); the Weinsteins’ bid for Miramax fell through; producers everywhere are reeling; Guillermo del Toro has quit The Hobbit; the summer films are overwhelming white already, but many freaked out at the suggestion of Donald Glover as Spiderman; and Brett Ratner is throwing around words like “edgy” in connection with his planned Snow White movie. The one bright spot you can always find in Hollywood? Pixar.

8. Brian Brooks highlights the must-see Cannes entries, and Eugene Hernandez recaps the business side of Cannes. The Village Voice assesses the post-Miramax crop of indie distributors, and the LA Times focuses in on Focus Features, one of the few remaining specialty distributors owned by a major. Chris Thilk says high-end indies are getting a lot of play this summer, while John Bradburn calls for grassroots “film gigging,” akin to low-fi, DIY music touring.

9. On the business side of DVD, Nielsen assesses the current impact of DVD rental kiosks, while Netflix sees DVD-by-mail peaking in 2013, expecting that streaming will take over thereafter. On the cinephilia side of DVD, Jonathan Rosenbaum considers DVD’s impact on the collective viewing experience, while Paul Synder wonders how streaming might affect such viewing and accessibility issues.

10. The best News for TV Majors links of the fortnight: Season Summaries, Lost Engagement, Buzz vs. Ratings, Upcoming Retrans Fights, Survivor Contracts, CNN Revenue, The TV Times, Emmy Nomination Eligibility Lists, Showrunner Panel, Zucker’s Exit Deal.

[Note: This is an iPad news-free edition. If you wanted info on the iPad last week, you found it, and if you didn’t want it, it found you, so I doubt anyone missed any of it.]

1. Decency, piracy, and copyright: R-rated red-band trailers are getting more controversial, while the head of the MPPA’s ratings board speaks (a bit) about the board’s job and makeup. Piracy is getting worse in Europe; it’s on the rise in France, and running rampant in Spain, to the point where Hollywood might refuse to distribute DVDs there. The MPAA can cheer up a bit at winning a piracy-related lawsuit against a search engine, and (torrenters beware!) the industry is going after tens of thousands of individual downloaders. Related, The Economist offers an intriguing questioning of copyright protection, coinciding with the 300th birthday of modern copyright law.

2. Apologies, failures, and hedged bets: Battlefield Earth’s original screenwriter apologized for the film’s awfulness, while scribe Dan Harmon very thoughtfully responded to a parent’s Monster House issue. Uma Thurman’s Motherhood sold a grand total of eleven tickets on its opening weekend Britain; here are 10 reasons why that might have happened. Hot Tub Time Machine drew more than eleven bodies on its opening weekend, but still fewer than anticipated, so here are 5 reasons for that (plus some inside info on its financials from Nikki Finke). A new study claims that Twitter can predict these failures. If so, that would sure make it easy for the Twitterati to rack up dough on the proposed box office futures market. But it’s the potential impact on a film’s box office dough that makes the film industry hate the futures market idea pretty much across the board. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has delayed its ruling on whether to let this go forth until next week, so we’ll have to wait and see if anyone ends up having to apologize for causing a film to sell only eleven tickets on its opening week because of futures frenzy.

3. Audiences seem willing to pay for 3D movies, but some think Hollywood could be overestimating 3D’s appeal, foisting a gimmick on us, and buying into the “Avatar fallacy”, which could result in 3D fading away yet again or just being a niche, not a standard. Cinematical’s Scott Weinberg would be fine with that end result, seeing as he thinks 3D is ruining movies, while Wired’s Dave Banks is simply tired of seeing 3D suddenly appear in every medium, and even James Cameron is questioning the direction of 3D. Clash of the Titans doesn’t really put us any closer to figuring out where 3D could head, and it also leaves open the question of if we should be told whether we’re getting “real” or “fake” 3D in a film (we apparently need to be warned about subtitles, so why not this?). Finally, we can look forward to Bollywood in 3D.

4. Ah, the rites of spring: the snow melts, the trees bud, the birds return, and film critics announce that movie stars aren’t needed anymore (a pronouncement we’ll see again in summer, fall, and winter). To wit, Anne Thompson points to Matt Damon as one of the few remaining true stars, and Patrick Goldstein says that (if it sticks around) 3D could doom stars. After all, Sam Worthington’s not a star, he’s just a no-risk franchise occupant, like a seat filler at the Oscars. A.O. Scott assures us that Greta Gerwig is a star, though.

5. Sony and 20^th Century Fox joined with Warner Bros. to help stave off Blockbuster’s demise by offering DVDs to the rental outfit on the same day they become available for sale. Conversely, Netflix agreed to a 28-day rental delay with a few studios in exchange for getting greater access to studio titles for streaming. David Poland sees this as a smart move for the immediate future of theatrical and rental health. Long-term, some industry analysts see Netflix’s video-on-demand model as the future due to higher profit margins,  and due to the possibility that another dinosaur, the United States Postal Service, could put a crimp in the mailing option by ceasing Saturday delivery. Redbox is thus shrewdly sussing out the possibility of streaming films.

6. The indie film world has a few successes to point to, such as Breaking Upwards, which cost only $15,000 and made that back in one theater opening (Motherhood: take note!). And the future value of online distribution was on display with Hulu’s In the Darkness. Whether it’s screening at a brick-and-mortar theater or online, word of mouth is crucial for indie film, though digital raises the very question of what is a filmmaker. The studio world has a few embarrassments to ignore, such as the three less-than-hoped-for bids for Miramax, including one from the Weinstein brothers, with the low bids likely due to the questionable value of the Miramax library (in fact, Variety says the values of all studio libraries are declining). Meanwhile, the bidding for MGM drags on, and it seems as if nobody really wants either Miramax or MGM in the end. Nobody wants to be head of the MPAA either.

7. Quentin Tarantino’s apparently not much for video games. But has he heard about the Tactile Gaming Vest that lets you feel like your body is being riddled with bullets? Eye-tracking systems also sound very cool. Tarantino at least might want to consider producing some form of transmedia content for his films, since he can now win an award from the Producers Guild for it. This institutionalization of transmedia looks like a good thing, according to most.

8. Facebook and Google are in a battle for a billion of our social profile dollars. Facebook at least appears to be leading in the category of wicked cool infographics generated to summarize it: Exhibit A and Exhibit B. YouTube doesn’t need infographics to prop it up when it’s got “David After Dentist” going for it. Wired goes one better than an infographic anyway with this great exposition of the five secrets of YouTube success, while Mashable takes us inside the YouTube war room.

9. Random good links I have left (hey, they don’t always all fit together neatly, but how could I not include news of the Big Lebowski porn parody?): The Big Lebowski porn parody; Surviving in the Music 2.0 world; The latest music sales stats; Are puppet movies doomed by CGI?; Top ten works of journalism of the decade; This American Life infographics.

10. Links to the best News for TV Majors links of the fortnight: Human Planet; Beck, Politics & Money; FX Mainstreaming; Behavior Placement; Comcast Net Win; Simon and Treme Profiled; Friday Night Ratings Fight; A Simpler Future; David Mills, 1961-2010; Peabody Awards; Cable in Congloms; Rebranding Guide.