Sometimes you see brands on the balance-sheet, sometimes you don’t

Both American and international accounting rules prohibit companies from recognising brands and many other “intangible” assets (such as customer lists) if they have created them themselves. Some marketers would like to change that. Roger Sinclair, who advises the MASB, an American body that sets marketing standards, points out that rules are inconsistent. The value of a brand—invisible when internally generated—is revealed when another company buys it.

Read more at The Economist

What are brands for?

Brands are the most valuable assets many companies possess. But no one agrees on how much they are worth or why. Most of the time they do not appear as assets on companies’ balance-sheets

Read more at the Economist

All-time low for album sales

For the first time since Nielsen SoundScan began keeping track in 1991, album sales failed to reach the four-million-sold mark this week, totaling just 3.97 million.

Digital album sales are down 11.7 percent for the year, and à la carte downloads are down another 12.8 percent according to Billboard. Illegal downloading has no doubt eroded much of those digital sales, but it’s the emergence of legal streaming sites like Spotify and Pandora that has also chipped away at overall sales.

Read more in Rolling Stone