Bloggers own the music industry's ass. Or at least the love handles.

Well, maybe not, but a study conducted by New York University's Stern Business School, Does Chatter Matter? The Impact of User-Generated Content on Music Sales, reports that albums which build a number of blog mentions during the time around their release do better than you might otherwise expect:

Our findings are as follows: (a) the volume of blog posts about an album is positively correlated with future sales, (b) greater increases in an artist’s Myspace friends week over week have a weaker correlation to higher future sales, (c) traditional factors are still relevant – albums released by major labels and albums with a number of reviews from mainstream sources like Rolling Stone also tended to have higher future sales.

We're not entirely sure this should be unexpected, as it's effectively saying 'if people are talking about your product, it must be good for sales' - a truism advertising men from the days of the front of the twentieth century would understand. But given that major labels struggle with internet related affairs, it might help that they can refer to a study which shows them this.

What's missing, at least from the abstract, is any word on if the tenor of blogs has any effect - can a cold shoulder from the blog world freeze sales? Yet?