Album sales in the United States jumped 3% during 2011 according to one report. That may seem like minor growth, but it is actually the first time album sales have increased since 2004. Nielsen SoundScan said Adele’s album “21″ sold 5.8 million copies, and total sales came in at 458 million albums for the year. Make no mistake, however, CD sales are still on the decline. Sales of full digital albums climbed 20% to 103 million units but CD sales dropped 6% to 225 million units. Nielsen’...

Facebook has decided to kill off its Facebook Deals product, a service that was launched to compete with other coupon service providers such as Groupon and LivingSocial. “After testing Deals for four months, we’ve decided to end our Deals product in the coming weeks,” Facebook told Reuters. “We think there is a lot of power in a social approach to driving people into local businesses. We’ve learned a lot from our test and we’ll continue to evaluate how to best serve local b...

Dish Network on Thursday revealed plans to shutter 200 additional Blockbuster stores, dropping the number of nationwide locations to approximately 1,500. Dish won an auction to take control of Blockbuster and its remaining assets this past April, after the fallen giant filed for bankruptcy last September. Dish said that the 15,000 employees working in Blockbuster locations that will remain operational will not lose their jobs. The company also said employees of the locations set to be shuttered will have the ...

Late last month, Amazon announced that customers subscribed to The New York Times via its eReader would qualify for a free digital subscription to the paper’s website. Not to be outdone, Barnes & Noble today announced that users subscribed to The Times via the NOOK Newsstand will also have full access to the  publication’s web content, too. The famed paper made waves on March 17th when it announced that it was moving to a pay wall model for its website. Users are allowed to read twenty NYT ...

Today American Express introduced its new digital payment system called Serve. Serve works similar to PayPal in that it allows users to create an account that can be used for sending or receiving money. Users can access their accounts from American Express’ Serve iOS and Android applications, via the Web, or through Facebook. Serve has two fees, including 2.9% plus $0.30 per load deposited, although this is discounted to 0$ for cash, debit, and ACH. Similarly, there’s a $2 fee on ATM cash withdraw...

Taiwanese handset giant HTC has announced a “strategic investment” made in the digital media-delivery company Saffron Digital. “Saffron Digital has developed an incredible expertise in mobile multimedia delivery,” said Peter Chou, HTC’s CEO. “This ability to deliver optimized content in the future will be a key asset as content becomes more and more complex and localized. We are excited to be working with Saffron to increase our global service delivery capabilities and exp...

According to Mr. Hugh Hefner’s Twitter account, his company’s iconic Playboy magazine will be coming to Apple’s iPad, beginning in March, uncensored. Since the launch of the iPhone, Apple has been fairly strict in keeping adult materal off of its digital content store. The two tweets we’re referencing read:Big news! Playboy–both old & new–will be available on iPad beginning in March.and in a reply to a follower’s question:@hughmcook Playboy on iPad will be uncens...

For this week’s Throwback Thursday, we’re rewinding time just fifteen short years back to 1996. A time when the Macarena was on top of the charts, the Olympics were in Atlanta, and fanny-packs were still moderately socially acceptable. We’re talking toys, and today we’re talking about Tamagotchis.First sold in 1996, Tamagotchis were portable, digital pets often seen dangling from keychains and backpacks. Before you could care for Sims on your PC, you could purchase a Tamagotchi from yo...

A camera without Wi-Fi? That’s so 2010. Today, Samsung announced its Wi-Fi enabled, 14.1 megapixel SH100 digital shooter. This new, connected camera has the ability to take your candids and, via its built-in Wi-Fi, display them on an HDTV with DLNA support, upload photos to Picasa or videos to YouTube, and post to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter… all without a computer. The camera can pair itself with your Android smartphone for use as a remote and wireless viewfinder:You can use...

Retail giant Sears isn’t the first company that comes to mind when you think about digital movie downloads, but a newly launched offering aims to change that. The company has announced Alphaline Entertainment, a digital movie rental and download service that runs on the RoxioNow platform. First rumored back in July, Alphaline will offer users 24-hour movie rentals for between $3 and $4 or movie purchases for between $10 and $20. Movies can be viewed on a PC or on any RoxioNow capable device (e.g. Xbox 3...

A report filed by the Wall Street Journal indicates that Google, Inc. will be opening an online eBook store in the near future. Scott Dougall, a Google product director, told The Journal that the new store “is set to debut in the U.S. by the end of the year and internationally in the first quarter of next year.” Independent booksellers around the U.S. are expected to play a fairly large roll in Google’s eBook ecosystem. As the WSJ reports: “Users will be able to buy books directly fr...

Yesterday, there were internet rumors aplenty after Apple posted a cryptic message about iTunes on its homepage, and today, we have to wonder no more. After a long holdout, it looks as though the music catalog of Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Star, and George Harrison — better known as The Beatles — will be available for download from the iTunes Music Store.It is a fairly well-known fact that Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, has a soft-spot for the gang from Liverpool and has been actively tryi...

Before the invention of the internets, information was a hot commodity. If you needed to acquire information on an unknown or obscure topic there were several options at your disposal: the public library, that eccentric uncle who always knew the strangest things, and… encyclopedias. Hell, if you’re old enough you might even remember encyclopedia salesman going door-to-door hawking the novels of knowledge to you or your parents. Well, if you’re a shade too old for the days of the encyclope...

According to analytics company Nielsen, digital music sales in the United States were flat during the first half of 2010; showing no positive growth from 2009. The data should be concerning to record labels as digital music sales rose 28% from 2007 to 2008 and 13% from 2008 to 2009. Nielsen’s Jean Littolff spoke with Reuters and explained: “I think this is a plateau, it doesn’t mean that this digital consumption is going to drop significantly.” Nielsen cited lack of consumer confidenc...