Electronic Commerce

The latest release from the Decemberists landed at No. 14 on the album charts this week despite a sizable handicap: It wasn't available on CD. EMI's Capitol Record opted to sell "The Hazards of Love" as a near-exclusive via Apple Inc.'s iTunes Store for a week. Illustrating the growing viability of the digital marketplace, the experiment resulted in iTunes shoppers' downloading about 18,000 copies during the week ended March 22, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Two snapshots of the music business were on display on the U.S. pop chart, with Prince's distribution strategy proving to be a bigger winner this week than the one used by rapper Flo Rida. While Prince landed at No. 2, selling 168,000 copies of his three-disc "LotusFlow3r," released exclusively through Target, Flo Rida struggled to turn success selling digital tracks into album sales. Flo Rida is a king of digital downloads.

Do you miss the monkey? Once the Internet vines were full of monkeys in banner ads that, if you "punched" them with your cursor, would bring you a free Xbox or iPod or maybe $25,000 in cash -- which would be excellent simian-pummeling wages, to be sure. But the monkey -- indeed, a whole class of flashy, shaky, maddening advertising collectively known as "punch the monkey" ads -- is going away, or at least slinking off to some forgotten cavern of the Internet where few will ever see it. Like MySpace.

Google Inc. started out 13 years ago as a simple search engine, but it has grown into a behemoth that has shaken up dozens of industries, including computers and cellphones. On Wednesday, it jumped into the music industry. The Mountain View, Calif., Internet giant unveiled a music search feature that lets users play millions of songs for free with an option to buy or rent them from several online music stores. Although not a direct threat to Apple Inc.'s hugely popular iTunes store, the new feature is expected to bolster the music services that compete with iTunes.

Chas Rampenthal expects to get more business in the wake of Michael Jackson's death, but he doesn't peddle CDs, posters or celebrity memorabilia. Rampenthal sells online wills. And as general counsel of LegalZoom.com, he noticed a sharp uptick in demand when model Anna Nicole Smith died in 2007, triggering a messy battle over her estate. "All that publicity reminded people they should have an up-to-date will," he said. The same could happen as Jackson's estate gets sorted out.

Shoppers are buying an increasing amount of their music and movies via Web downloads. But video game sales remain firmly rooted in old-fashioned stores because many games require enormous software files that can take hours to download. That's now poised to change. One company, OnLive Inc., showcased one such effort at the Game Developer Conference on Tuesday night. The service promises to let players buy or rent the latest games and start playing within seconds on their television or computers.

It may sound counterintuitive to launch an online marketplace as Web retail sales are slumping, but Internet domain name registrar Go Daddy Group Inc. is betting that it can translate its home page traffic into sales of teak slab tables and decorative clogs. The Scottsdale, Ariz., company's new Go Daddy Marketplace lets users list as many things as they want for a $5 monthly fee and a 10% commission on products that sell.

A federal jury in Los Angeles ruled Friday that Eminem's music royalties don't change just because a song has been sold online. The decision prevents, at least for now, an upending of the music industry that could have greatly changed the financial relationship between record labels and artists, in which labels have long commanded most of the proceeds from album sales.

With the lure of every song for 99 cents, Apple Inc.'s iTunes upended the retail establishment to become the nation's top music seller in less than six years. But the digital media powerhouse said Tuesday it would follow one of the oldest tenets of capitalism: The more someone wants something, the more you can charge for it. Apple finally bowed to a long-standing recording industry demand and agreed to sell music downloads at three prices -- 69 cents, 99 cents and $1.29.

More times than he can count, Gregory Day has been asked where guests of Shutters on the Beach can buy the rolling shutter doors that inspire his Santa Monica hotel's name. "I must get 10 requests a week for all kinds of things," says Day, general manager of the $500-a-night hotel. "They want to know where they can get our light fixtures, the hotel's rental bicycles, the uniforms the staff wears."