The music industry had an awful 2007 as total album sales plunged 15 percent to 500.5 million units, according to tracking data from Nielsen SoundScan. Online album sales barely rose at all, up 2.4 percent to 30.1 million units; growth was 19 percent in 2006. The figures represent the lowest total and the steepest decline since Nielsen began measuring music sales in 1993. Experts (predictably) blamed piracy for the declines, but they also cited competition from other entertainment sectors like videogames. However, overall music sales, which include single and digital track sales, rose 14 percent to 1.4 billion …

China extended the reach of its Great Web Wall on Thursday by announcing that it would only allow state-controlled Web sites to post video to the Web and by requiring Internet providers to delete and report certain kinds of content. As yet, it's unclear how the new restrictions will affect sites like Google's YouTube, which depend on its users to upload pieces of video. However, a YouTube spokesperson said the new rules "could be a cause for concern, depending on the interpretation." The new regulations take effect on Jan. 31. They were approved by both the …

At next week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Motorola is set to launch a mobile TV device (not a phone) that plays live television, on-demand video clips and programs saved by digital video recorders. Motorola already sells phones with live TV--as do most of its rivals--but the company seems to be testing consumers' appetite for video on portable devices. Do they want phones with TV functionality or separate devices? It could be that consumers don't care much for mobile television, preferring to wait until they get home to watch their favorite shows. Consumers are more likely to …

It's a move that marks the end of a digital music era, as Sony BMG Music Entertainment becomes the last of music's Big Four to free its music from digital rights management software during the first quarter. Long the scourge of music lovers and device makers alike, DRM protection restricts song distribution across multiple platforms and devices. The idea is to guard against illegal duplication. But it also ties record labels to exclusive contracts with music sellers and distributors, which keeps reach and revenues down, as third parties take their cut. Sony BMG would be the last …

Google and Microsoft have shared their vision of the computing "cloud," an endless swath of computing power that makes it possible for all of our information to be stored on the Web rather than inside crash-prone PCs. The "cloud" would never crash, as information would be distributed across a mass of machines operating in perfect harmony. Sounds amazing, right? Wrong: "Taken to its logical conclusion, the world would be left with no more than a handful of 'computers', each one a massively powerful distributed network built and managed by some deep-pocketed corporation," a report warns. Which …