Kid Rock famously elected not to make any of the songs from his smash album Rock N Roll Jesus, notably the multi-format radio smash "All Summer Long," available for download. He has profited handsomely from that decision, as his album has climbed back from a low of #82 in March to #2 this week on The Billboard 200, which is based on sales data collected by Nielsen/SoundScan.

But Kid Rock's decision created an opening for an entity known as Hit Masters to cover "All Summer Long" and release its version as a download. This week, 96,000 fans bought the cover version, nearly as many as the 101,000 fans who bought Kid Rock's album. The Hit Masters version (on the low-overhead Hip Kiddy label) ranks #5 on Hot Digital Songs, up from #32 last week.

"All Summer Long" isn't the only cover version on the current chart. The marvelous "American Boy" by Estelle featuring Kanye West is no longer available for download as a track. If you want it, you have to buy Estelle's album, Shine. As a result,

What were the biggest hits of the '70s, '80s and '90s? If you go strictly by weeks at #1 on Billboard's Hot 100, the answers are Debby Boone's "You Light Up My Life" for the '70s, Olivia Newton-John's "Physical" for the '80s and the Mariah Carey-Boyz II Men collaboration "One Sweet Day" for the '90s.

But you could argue that the real biggest hits of bygone decades are those songs that fans are paying to download to this day. None of the monster hits cited above are included on Nielsen/SoundScan's running list of the 200 songs with the most paid downloads.

The vast majority of the songs on that list were hits within the last few years. That's no surprise: These are the songs that have been on the radio most frequently in the period in which has downloading has really taken off. The list of the top 200 songs with the most paid downloads includes just 10 songs from the '70s, '80s, and '90s. And they're not necessarily the songs you might expect. But these are the "blasts from the past"

An untitled album by Nas debuts at #1 on The Billboard 200 chart. Nas originally planned to use the N-word as the album title, but ultimately decided not to go there.

Richard Pryor used the word in the titles of two mid-1970s comedy albums, That Nigger's Crazy and Bicentennial Nigger. Both albums reached the top 30 on the Billboard album chart. That Nigger's Crazy also spent four weeks at #1 on the R&B album chart and even won a Grammy for Best Comedy Recording.

Pryor was among the first African American artists to reclaim and repurpose that incendiary word. I'm repeating the word exactly as it appeared on his album covers, rather than attempt to rewrite history by using asterisks or dashes. The other titles in this discussion are also exactly as they appeared at the time.

N.W.A. debuted in 1988, its name an abbreviation for a phrase (Niggaz With Attitude) that is built around the N-Word. In 1991, the group's third full-length album was titled NIGGAZ4LIFE, though the title was shown as

Lil Wayne's Tha Carter III logs its third week at #1 on the Billboard album chart. It's the first rap album to top the chart for as many as three weeks since 50 Cent's The Massacre in 2005, which had six weeks in the lead. Tha Carter III is only the third album to log three weeks on top in 2008, following Alicia Keys' As I Am (which had one additional week at #1 when it debuted in November 2007) and Jack Johnson's Sleep Through The Static.

The week's other big story is that the soundtrack to Mamma Mia! debuts at #7. This is the first time that an album of ABBA music has made the top 10 (though the songs on the soundtrack aren't performed by the famed quartet but by the stars of the film, which opens this Friday). ABBA's highest-charting album was The Album, which peaked at #14 in 1978.

ABBA was among the biggest acts in the world in the 1970s, but it never seemed to hit the top tier of stardom in the U.S. It amassed four top 20 albums and four top 10 singles--not bad, but far from