The Billboard 200 On the chart this week, One Direction found a home at No. 1 with its second album, “Take Me Home.” The SYCO/Columbia effort moved 540,000 copies in its first week, according to Nielsen SoundScan, marking the third-largest debut of the year. Six more albums started in the top 10, including the new…

Six months after Mog was acquired by Beats Electronics, founder and CEO David Hyman’s departure marks the beginning of the Beats era of the music-subscription service. Several sources tell Billboard.biz that Hyman was “never expected to be on for the long haul,” as the company gets ready for a relaunch in 2013. His exit was “very amicable,” one…

Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich stopped doing interviews like this a long time ago; he was simply burned too badly by the post-Napster backlash.  And more than twelve years later, artists are still frightened to take a stand like this, for fear of alienating fans.  But looking back at this interview with Charlie Rose, in the…

Today’s HITS album sales chart has just closed and we’re already peering into our crystal ball for next week, folks, thanks to one-day sales reports from those retailers around the country who haven’t succumbed to tryptophan shock. Heading into holiday weekend, our retail experts ask for your indulgence, with a greater than usual margin of error due to cranberry…