Iron Maiden makes millions of dollars by playing live for pirates | The Verge - British company Musicmetric indicated a surge in Iron Maiden piracy from South America. Instead of pursuing legal action, the band toured the continent extensively, making $2.58 million from one sold-out Sao Pãolo show alone, and adding another 5 million fans to its already extensive social media fanbase.

Labels: distribution

Apple buys social media analytics firm Topsy for over $200M - Topsy offers highly targeted analysis of Twitter's "firehose," or the stream of tweets posted to the microblogging service. As a Twitter-certified partner, the firm looks at tweets and other user data to track user sentiment, find influencers for specific subjects and measure the effectiveness of Twitter ad campaigns, among other metrics.

Labels: itunes, twitter