Another expansion for Spotify, the much hyped European streaming music service: It’s now going to be available on Nokia phones and other handsets that run the Symbian platform. That’s good, because the service is supposed to work best as a mobile play.

But Spotify has yet to make a key expansion: To the U.S., where the big music labels worry that consumers will love everything about the site except paying for it.

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AOL, which has already told investors it will spend up to $200 million firing a good chunk of its staff, has now told employees. The company is looking for “up to 2,500 volunteers,” CEO Tim Armstrong told his staff today. That’s a third of AOL’s payroll.

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Add one more voice to the chorus of conventional wisdom: The Web ad market has stopped getting worse, but it’s going to be a while before it starts getting healthy.

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Here’s another quick glimpse of the advertising market, courtesy of Viacom. The cable giant says ad sales are still down, but that the rate of decline is slowing. And in the fall of 2009, that constitutes pretty good news.

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Amazon won’t even tell us how many Kindles it has actually sold, so projecting how many it’s going to move in the future makes for particularly tough fortune-telling. But that doesn’t stop anyone from trying: Forrester thinks Jeff Bezos and company will move 600,000 newly discounted units this holiday season and sell 1.8 million by the end of 2009.

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I’ve been reporting a steady drip of cautiously optimistic forecasts for the ad business, but this one is less sunny: A JP Morgan survey of ad buyers says they’re unlikely to boost spending until next year.

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Apple’s long-awaited entry into the Chinese phone market is finally here. Or at least it will be by the end of the year: China Unicom says it has struck a three-year deal with Apple to sell iPhones in China that will kick in during the fourth quarter.

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From the “that makes sense” file: Smartphones like the iPhone and the BlackBerry now account for almost one in three phones sold in the U.S. And if they keep getting better and cheaper–remember when iPhones sold for $600?–that share is only going to increase.

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Can the hype surrounding buzzy tech like Twitter, the Kindle and cloud computing get any louder? No, pronounces tech consultancy Gartner Inc., which has a very official-looking chart to make its case. But are you better off being on top of the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” or working your way up the “Slope of Enlightenment”? Who knows?

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Newsflash: More data confirm that ad spending was really bad last year. But ad execs–at least those in certain industries–say things may be bottoming out this spring.

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While the chattering classes continue to pick over Portfolio’s bones, it’s worth checking in on the business titles Condé Nast was targeting with its ill-fated magazine. In short: None of them are suffering from a Portfolio-like swoon, but they’re all in lousy shape. And while we’re at it, let’s dispense with the story that Condé Nast burned $100 million or more on this one.

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It’s now conventional wisdom to expect advertising declines of 20 percent or more as the big media companies deliver this season’s earnings reports. But the giant ad holding companies that make and place those ads aren’t getting beaten up quite as badly. In fact, they’re all delivering remarkably similar results.

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Good news for Mark Zuckerberg and company: More and more people are spending the holidays with their virtual friends on Facebook.

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The industry’s report card is just like every report card it has had since the advent of Napster: Digital sales are up, but not enough to counter the plunge in CD sales. We’ll hear the same thing in 12 months. In the meantime, though, there is lots of good music to listen to. Go find some of it and have a happy new year.

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It’s now very old news that the online ad market is going to get roughed up next year. But by how much? Don’t bother guessing until the end of the month: Online ad execs say sales have basically stopped until the end of the holiday season.

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