Before we dive headfirst into 2008, let's take a quick look at some of the financial headlines that made 2007 so memorable. Between the beefy acquisitions and tactical position jockeying, a lot has changed over the past year.

Let's dig in, month by delicious month.

January
The world stopped laughing at Blockbuster (NYSE:BBI) when the DVD rental giant announced that its Total Access program had 2.2 million subscribers. Marrying mail-delivered rentals with free in-store exchanges resonated with the public.

OK, so the company wound up losing a ton of money on the service. Total Access also began to lose net subscribers after an eventual summer price hike. You have to admit it, though. For a brief snippet of time, Blockbuster didn't seem like the Charlie Brown of retail.

February
 Sirius (NASDAQ:SIRI) and XM (NASDAQ:XMSR) finally smooched, agreeing to a merger that would combine the only two licensed providers of satellite radio. Is it a dead deal because regulators won't let duopolies become monopolies? Is it a done deal because there are just so many aural outlets that it's naive to tag this as a monopoly?

No one knows for sure, not even the regulators. The deal was announced more than 10 months ago, and a decision won't be forthcoming until 2008. Yikes. And you thought the wait for Howard Stern to start on Sirius was long?

March
You know that things are going badly for the major music labels when Paul McCartney ditches his longtime label -- the way he did in March -- to go with Starbucks. Adding insult to injury, the CD winds up being a hot-selling hit for the java-meister that knows a thing or two about serving things hot.

The move set the stage for others like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails to announce self-distribution deals later in the year. Madonna even dumped her label to go with a concert promoter. Will the last major label artist please turn off the lights on the way out?

April
Pass the popcorn. AMC Theaters is going public. The country's second-largest multiplex operator filed for its IPO in April. Offering up more plot twists than an M. Night Shyamalan flick -- and more explosions than a Michael Bay spectacle -- AMC pulled the offering a month later, before coughing it back up in the fall. 

May
Wasn't satellite radio supposed to be the one medium where it was OK to be politically incorrect? A runaway segment that culminated in lewd remarks ended with XM handing down a 30-day suspension to its Opie & Anthony Show, despite a promise to its subscribers that no content would be taken off the air during the company's courtship with Sirius.

In a bizarro twist, advertisers on the show threatened to boycott XM if the shock jocks weren't brought back on the air. Did XM take one for the team in acting terrestrial to appease regulators who threatened to derail its merger with Sirius? The show returned a month later, but the scar of XM as a censor lingers.

June
 Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) finally releases the iPhone. Despite the long lines of pioneers, Apple sweetened the incentives with a $200 price cut a couple of months later. Published reports also had Apple in talks with movie studios to provide digital movie rentals for iPod users, something that was finally confirmed just last week.

July
The seventh and final installment in the Harry Potter book series came out in July. You've got to love the timing, giving kids a thick epic in the lull between schoolwork.

August
Classmates Media files to go public. Taking a page out of the AMC handbook, the company behind the Classmates.com alum-powered social network is also stricken with cold feet, pulling its offer four months later.

Was it the pesky streak of operating losses or the market's realization that Classmates.com and Facebook are two entirely different critters?

September
NBC's proud peacock feathers brushed off Apple in September. The network behind some of the best-selling television shows on Apple's iTunes store decided to pull its latest primetime content off the site in anticipation of its own digital solution.

It proved to be a Dunder-Mifflinesque move by NBC. Upset your largest digital distributor -- after giving YouTube the cold shoulder -- before your platform isn't even ready? Maybe peacocks aren't so proud after all.

October
Just weeks after calling Facebook a fad, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) snaps up a small stake in the social networking site that values it at $15 billion. To be fair, the investment also won Mr. Softy some valuable global advertising opportunities through Facebook. I haven't seen this much mutual back-scratching since watching a pair of chimps pick bugs off one another on Animal Planet. Microsoft gets a wider ad network. Facebook gets an outlandish valuation. Everyone wins (well, save for those who believe the $15 billion price tag).

November
Then again, maybe $15 billion is too low for a hot dot-com firecracker. Alibaba.com soared to command a $25 billion market cap on its first day of overseas trading. Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO) was sitting pretty with a 40% stake in Alibaba.com's parent company, until investors realized that the rest of Yahoo! isn't doing so hot at the moment.

December
 E*Trade (NASDAQ:ETFC) launched "an aggressive customer win-back campaign" after the discount broker became one of the more unlikely players to sell distressed assets for pennies on the dollar in light of the subprime mortgage meltdown.

Even pitching high-quality mortgages proved daunting for several financial services providers in 2007. It's no wonder that 2008 kicks off with so many companies taking a sober approach in their models.

Don't worry, I'll be back next year to point out how punch drunk they ultimately got.

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