Paid and Social Media Report Card

Long Tail's Chris Anderson gives this report card on media, affectionately titled "Media Meltdown"

Here are the lowlights for you:

• TV: network TV had its lowest ratings week ever in July.
• Music: weekly album sales set a 10-year low in July. For the year, CD album sales are down 4.2%; although digital single downloads (still less than 10% of the business) are up 77% and are nearly making up the difference in revenue terms. 
• Radio: the music radio listening audience is down 8.5% this year alone, continuing a multi-decade decline.
• DVDs: shipments are down 4% so far this year, more than 30 million units behind the same period last year.
• Newspapers: circulation, which peaked in 1987, is declining faster than ever and is down another 2.6% so far this year.

Eric Kintz, via DailyFix, originally reported on Anderson's post He adds a great social media flavor to it, including some of these highlights:

• YouTube announced in July that viewers are now watching more than 100 million videos per day on its site.
• The blogosphere is 100 times bigger than it was just 3 years ago
• MySpace has 75 million users, 15 million daily unique logins, is growing by a massive 240,000 new users per day, and is now a solid second to Yahoo in terms of pageviews!