M.Video says music CD sales fell by 3.5 times in the last two years.

“Discs with video and software are still on sale but, in the next two years, the retailer wants to transfer the sale of all media products on to the internet,” Vedomosti reports. “It will sell music, software and movies through the online store, not physical media.”

Content is not M.Video’s main business as much as home electronics goods. That diversity at least stands it in good stead.

Just as in publishing and other sectors, the drop-off in physical sales is becoming so pronounced that many publishers and retailers are deciding simply to get out of the physical game and to seek a more viable digital alternative.

Tower Records, Virgin Megastore and Zavvi are amongst those whose bricks and mortar have crumbled. HMV (LSE: HMV), on which labels depend for much of the UK sales which still make up the lion’s share of music revenue, was rescued from a default last month only because those labels wrote off debt by taking equity in the company.

Russian recorded music sales fell by 46 percent between 2006 and 2011, and physical sales fell by 35 percent in 2010 alone, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. But the country’s online population is booming.

As Livenation Labs emerging technology SVP Ethan Kaplan (a former *Warner Bros.* Records technology executive) says: “When people talk about ‘saving’ the music business, they’re talking about saving a business that doesn’t exist anymore. It’s gone. Selling records in to stores, that’s not a sustainable business.”

Music strategist Mark Mulligan told an industry event in London on Thursday: “If HMV disappeared off our high street, about half the music market could disappear overnight.”

M.Video online sales rose 90 percent through 2011, pushing company sales up 30 percent.

The UK reached that mark in 2010. Emarketer forecasts the U.S. will reach it in 2012.

In Russia, online ad spend is now just marginally bigger than in print, yet still three times less than TV, according to Russian Association of Communication Agencies (AKAR) figures. The RuNet’s 56 percent growth is the kind of growth rate seen in western markets four years ago, when internet adoption exploded before the downturn.

Emerging markets are now catching up, as broadband adoption soars amongst new middle classes, despite the ongoing economic turmoil around them. The internet accounts for 16 percent of ad spend in Russia.

The largest gains came from contextual ads, which attracted 63 percent more spending. Print saw the slowest gains, just seven percent, though the entire Russian advertising market grew by 21 percent through 2011.

Search leader Yandex, which heads Google (NSDQ: GOOG) on 60.8 percent share versus 25.5 percent, on Wednesday reported 2011 revenue grew 60 percent. More at Quintura.

Mail.ru sold 56 percent more display ads in Q3 2011.

This article originally appeared in GigaOm.

IM+, made by Stuttgart-based Shape, is taking the money from Finam, which has previously invested in the Badoo and Mamba liaisons/dating social networks.

With the deal, the pair are making a JV named FinamShape to exploit a web-based version at plus.im. It competes with services including the excellent imo.im.

Shape says IM+ has clocked 17.5 million users and serves up 800 million mobile ads each month.

The app handles multiple IM protocols and social networks and recently introduced its own social messenger, Beep, in to the app.

Finam says it wants to invest in “global players in the TMT sector worldwide”. Badoo does very well on mobile, and has solidified its business model of charging users to put themselves at the top of search lists.

IM+: Introducing Beep from SHAPE Services on Vimeo.

Release.

First up, Japan: Kindle could launch there as soon as April, Reuters (NYSE: TRI) reports. Amazon has been been in discussions with Japanese publishers since last year.

Reuters refers to an article published in the Nikkei, which I was not able to access without a subscription. It says the Kindle Touch will be Kindle Japan’s “flagship model” and that Amazon Japan “will team up with NTT DoCoMo Inc. (NYSE: DCM) for wireless downloads of e-books over the mobile phone service provider’s network.”

Amazon already sells physical books at Amazon.co.jp.

Next, Brazil — by June, according to a piece in Brazilian trade publication PublishNews, found via The Digital Reader. Publishing Perspectives reported last month that Amazon had hired a Kindle vendor manager and is beginning negotiations with Brazilian publishers — “initially, only to sell e-books” — this month.

There is currently no Brazilian Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN). (Uh, besides the actual rainforest there.) But e-commerce in the country is growing quickly. Brazil’s largest book publishers all offer e-books, though e-books are still estimated to make up less than 1 percent of total book sales.

Last year Amazon launched Kindle stores in Spain, Italy, France and Germany.

This is a significant deal for Facebook on two separate fronts:

– It ties Facebook up with one of the bigger companies in the area of mobile billing: Bango is the payments provider for RIM’s App World, which yesterday once again laid claim to being the second-most profitable app storefront after Apple’s — largely because of the fact that it has a strong business in paid apps and that those apps are billed directly to users’ mobile bills in 34 countries. RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) yesterday claimed that 13 percent of its App World developers earn in excess of $100,000, which is massive considering how many developers earn next to nothing.

In December last year, Bango also secured a deal with Amazon.

Like the Facebook announcement that deal provided no detail about what it was that Bango would do for the company — although that, too, could be an opportunity for Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) to build carrier billing into its mobile apps. A spokesperson contacted today declined to comment on the details of either the Amazon or Facebook deals, although she did confirm that Amazon was an active customer.

The use of carrier billing also begs another question: for what? That could point to Facebook offering richer mobile services on its web platform. The could include paid content apps or the ability to pay for other goods and services, perhaps linked up with location-based deal offerings. As the FT points out, that’s something that Bango itself started to promote, coincidentally just when news began to leak out of Facebook’s own HTML5 push, code-named “Project Spartan.”

It could also mean Bango working alongside or in place of other billing partners: Bango competes directly with Facebook partners Zong and Boku.

– The other significant side of Bango’s business is in the area of analytics for mobile web sites as well as apps. This is a service it already provides various high-profile publishers like CNN, Fox (NSDQ: NWS), and EA Mobile, among others — as well as to mobile ad agency AKQA — to help track how mobile content is used and consumed. That helps the publishers not only track what content “works” but also can be used to build profiles to sell advertising and marketing services.

If reports are true, that is another area where Facebook is going to have to start doing some serious tracking, too: the company is reportedly going to start inserting “sponsored stories” into mobile users’ feeds, which would represent Facebook’s first big foray into offering marketing services to brands since filing for its IPO last week — where it pointedly mentioned it had yet to start offering such revenue-generating services.

Facebook is holding an advertising confab at the end of this month — its first high-profile foray into wooing Madison Avenue — where it may well announce more details about how its mobile plans are progressing.

The other point to be made here is that it is interesting that Facebook is taking the road less traveled by companies like Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) and exploring routes to align itself with carriers as it expands what it does on mobile. It’s not the first time: Facebook has a whole swathe of non-smartphone users that can update their statuses by mobile; many of those feature phone Facebookers are using SMS, which also require carrier interconnections to operate.

The plants will remain operational now for “smartphone product customization.” The news comes amidst unconfirmed reports that the company is planning to curtail its Symbian lineup after the release of the next model.

Nokia (NYSE: NOK) says that the transfer will result in the loss of 4,000 jobs in total, and the reductions will take place through the end of 2012.

Nokia does not outline how much the move to Asia will mean in terms of money saved, but this is a decision that has been some time in the making: these were plants that were spared in the last round of cuts under CEO Stephen Elop.

Since then, Nokia has reported yet more declines in its smartphone shipments, mainly around its legacy Symbian platform. The company is now gradually moving to making more of its smartphone portfolio based on Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform.

Now, Nokia says that the move is being made to put the manufacturing bases closer to where the different components are being made for those smartphones. That is a move we have seen from many other companies — and was the subject of a series of stories recently concerning Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) in China and the role of Foxconn in that business.

The move to make these plants focused on customization, meanwhile, points to some focus that Nokia does seem to maintain on its software and services for its devices — a crucial part of the company’s differentiation as it moves more and more to a platform being used by its competitors as well. Others that make Windows Phone devices include Samsung and HTC.

The news comes amidst other reports about Nokia that claim the company is planning to curtail its Symbian lineup after the next model comes out.

Symbian is gradually being phased out for Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform, but Nokia had originally said it would support the OS until 2016, and that could still be the case even if it stopped making devices based on it. Nokia transferred the operation of Symbian to Accenture last year.

A spokesperson from Nokia told paidContent that the article was “speculative at best” and would not comment on device rumor or speculation:

“As we have previously said Symbian continues to be an important part of our portfolio and going forward it will play a more focused role as we accelerate our transition to Windows Phone,” he said. “We remain fully committed to the platform through 2016, which means on-going software support as we go forward.”

The company is currently rolling out an update to Symbian, Belle, and the devices remain popular in the Middle East, Russia and India, even as they have lost out to Android-based devices, Apple’s iPhone and even RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) in other markets.

On a wider-market level, there is good reason for RIM to be hosting a developer conference in Europe: it’s a market where it has had some mixed success of late, but that includes some key wins: data from GfK last week indicated that, in fact, BlackBerry is the most-purchased device brand at the moment in the UK. (Others say Android was the most popular, and still others claim the iPhone ran away with the market.) Thorsten Heins, in his keynote today, noted that 65 percent of the population of Europe, Middle East and Africa are still using feature phones. And that, despite everything, still spells opportunity for RIM.

RIM today said that it now has 60,000 apps in its App World applications storefront — still miniscule compared to the millions that live collectively on the Android Market and Apple’s App Store — but a significant improvement on the 17,000 that were in App World last January. Collectively, the store has seen 2 billion downloads as of last month, with 6 million downloads per day.

The company’s VP of developer relations, Alec Saunders, also repeated a claim we’ve heard before from the company: after Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), AppWorld is the “most profitable” of mobile platforms. This is based on the company claiming to have more paid downloads than Android’s Market, where the vast majority of popular apps are free to download. Part of RIM’s approach has been to enable carrier billing to pay for app downloads — meaning that the apps get charged directly to a users’ bill. That is something that is still nascent on the Market. (Apple handles billing itself via iTunes.) RIM says that it has now enabled carrier billing in 34 different countries

What’s interesting is that Saunders also spelled out a bit of detail on how much money developers are making on the platform: apparently, 13 percent of all app publishers have made $100,000 or more through AppWorld. That detail sparked off some responses:

“On the other platforms, virtually no one covers their investment as anything more than a hobby,” one developer, Matt Baxter-Reynolds, tweeted to me earlier. “That metric is just not believable.” That kind of thinking underscores the idea that apps and app stores are really just there to drive more stickiness to a platform and encourage more hardware sales.

But another raised the point that in fact RIM most likely attracts a different kind of app maker than those who have swarmed to iOS and Android. “I’d say [that is] reasonable,” noted another developer, Shaun Austin. “BB doesn’t seem a platform as likely to attract hobbyists in the way Android/iOS does.”

Of the apps that are selling best, four out of the top 10 on App World are games for the PlayBook tablet, RIM said. You can read that as a vote for engagement for a tablet that has been less than successful against the iPad and Android-based tablet makers.

Last week, RIM released an updated SDK for the BBM Social Platform, a newish area the company has been exploring, leveraging the wide usage it already has for its BlackBerry Messenger service. Today it noted that it now has 50 million people engaging on that platform through various apps, with the most-used of them being the BlackBerry version of Wikitude, an augmented-reality search app.

Looking ahead, it’s products like the BBM Social Platform that are perhaps where RIM should be putting more of its focus: it is, after all, an experience that is unique to RIM and helps set it apart from other handset makers. The company is gearing up for two significant platform updates in the months ahead, with BlackBerry 10 for handsets and PlayBook 2.0 for the tablet, and all eyes will be on how dynamic and easy these will be to use in creating services. RIM has already said that it will be looking for close integration of the BBM Social Platform with BlackBerry 10, which will the see the company doing more in social gaming on the OS.

The Dublin- and Rome-based company is buying Cidade Internet, a Brazilian portal which publishes 10 popular websites and other blogs inluding Fofocando, Automovel and Das Marias.

Formerly known as GoAdv, Populis operates the Nanopublishing and Blogosfere blog networks, has built up through acquiring Italy’s Blogo.it network from Dada, Germany’s Mokono network. It also owns Excite Europe, the Better Deals repository of user-created consumer guides and the Koego blog platform. In all, the company sels ads against the thousands of articles contributed by its hundreds of users each month across what is now a portfolio of several hundred websites.

Brazil’s consumer internet economy is taking off, with online ad spend surpassing that in the UK in 2011 (source and more data: IAB Brasil).

Cidade’s properties will be fully integrated under the Populis banner. Populis is gaining Cidade’s Rio and Sao Paulo offices, intends to open another this year and add 30 staff.

By trying to operate so strongly in non-English languages, Populis claims to avoid the “Demand Media clone” tag – complementarity that could ultimately make for an exit to such a group.