Last year Jackson's death spurred a boost in Sony's sales. But that's over, and the trend line is pointing down yet again.

You have to hand it to the ego-soaked imagination of singer Kanye West, who has debuted what appears to be the longest music video of all time for his song "Runaway." It's not just his Twitter rants that are wild, as you will find after digesting this gem--an art film, really.

With group-buying Web sites, getting more people to join in on a deal gets you a better deal.

The music industry's decline has been so prolonged that this now qualifies as a man-bites-dog story: Sony says its music sales actually went up, just a bit, in the last quarter. Thank Michael Jackson and Susan Boyle.

While an iPad in the wild--held up by Stephen Colbert--got a lot of ink, here's a video from last night's Grammy Awards, which went all "Avatar" during a tribute to the late Michael Jackson--when a panoply of belt-it-out singers performed one of his posthumous songs with a 3-D twist. In fact, much of the audience was wearing 3-D glasses--including Beyoncé, pictured here--to properly experience the performance of "Earth Song" and its accompanying film, which was supposed to be part of Jackson's "This Is It" tour.

If our search engine queries are, on some level, a reflection of who we are as a people, then we are a sorry, sorry lot indeed. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo all released their lists of the top search queries for 2009 today and they reveal us to be a nation of celebrity-obsessed, swine flu-suffering, vampire-loving, Megan Fox-ogling, Lady Gaga-humming, World Wrestling Entertainment-patronizing Nascar fans.

Since Bing only debuted at mid-year (and at the D: All Things Digital conference too), BoomTown is willing to cut it some slack. Until the Microsoft search service revealed on its blog last night that Perez Hilton--the irksome gossip blogger--beat out "Transformers" hottie Megan Fox and "Twilight" hottie-er Robert Pattinson for the top celebrity searched using Bing in 2009. Clearly, Bing's algorithm needs some tweaking by real people.

Want to get Michael Jackson's new single? You will be able to get it on iTunes this month, contrary to earlier reports. But there's a catch: You're going to have to buy some of the late singer's other songs, too.