British band Coldplay's fourth album Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends debuted with impressive sales over the weekend, taking the first place position in the UK sales chart based on 302,000 copies sold over only three days. Music newspaper NME also reported that the album's sales are more than the other top five albums combined in the UK. As previously reported though, that figure is still below the sales that its predecessor X&Y sold during its first week in 2005: over 464,000.

The album is released in the United States on Tuesday, and hopes are high that it can duplicate, if not, exceed those sales in the largest music market in the world. X&Y has sold over 3 million copies in the U.S. since it was released three years ago.

Numerous reports indicate that struggling music company EMI is hedging its entire summer and possibly the year on the release of Viva la Vida, even though the band seems to be downplaying the hopes that fuel industry executives: "This time, we were hungry to disassociate ourselves from anything other than improving someone's holiday or bath time." Coldplay's success in the last three days in the UK is no doubt highly prized by EMI and its current owners, private equity firm Terra Firma, after many high profile and selling artists have left the company in the last year.

Coldplay is by no means the only highly successful band under contract at EMI, but the pressure that seems placed on the band will no doubt have an effect on Viva la Vida's success and what happens in the U.S. charts this week.

In the wake of his nasty divorce, Paul McCartney and his management are in the process of planning a massive world tour for next fall including shows in the United States. According to British newspaper NME, McCartney is also preparing to debut a large amount of new material on the tour, which will undoubtedly also feature material from his most recent album Memory Almost Full after McCartney played only limited venues last summer for its promotion. The pending tour will be the largest of its size for McCartney in nearly three years, after he toured in promotion of his 2006 Grammy Award winning album Chaos and Creation in the Backyard.

The announcement that a tour is in the planning stages comes nearly a month after a British court awarded McCartney's ex-wife Heather Mills a nearly $49 million divorce settlement, granting her about $34,000 a day for their marriage. McCartney's separation from Mills began in the summer of 2006, and the divorce included security matters and details related to the pair's daughter.

Rolling Stone magazine recently published a fortieth anniversary issue celebrating the magazine's tenure in the popular culture business. After reading the issue and wading through the multitude of advertisements, I started thinking about Rolling Stone as the precursor to so many of the music magazines in existence today and how these kinds of media serve the record industry in an increasingly digital world. Forty years ago, Rolling Stone may have been an inventive method to sell music, with interviews and features about artists, but as it is now the magazine and its followers are hardly what they claim to be: music magazines.

The very notion of a "music magazine" is quickly becoming outdated, as is found simply by perusing through the articles and features through most of the print I purchase regularly. Compare it to other, older magazines, like the British NME and you will find that the Rolling Stone falls down in coverage simply because there is an overabundance of non-music advertisements. Even other contemporary magazines, like Blender, manage to advertise the actual music, while both sell the digital devices that are quickly becoming the mediums of music transferal.

If championing the music is the goal, which presumably it is, Rolling Stone has never seemed far from what we call "mainstream," so it hardly has the capacity to introduce new bands and compete with the growth of online services like Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG)'s YouTube or News Corporation (NYSE: NWS)'s MySpace. Even other magazines quickly champion lesser known bands into mass-popularity. Consider NME, the magazine was a massive supporter of the Arctic Monkeys and they quickly became more popular than they had been, even with the online support. With the weekly issue NME prints, the publisher keeps a more up-to-date and consistent online news service, signaling that the move online is not contained to artists.