• Album sales were up 5% last week and were 12% lower than the same week last year. For the year, album sales are down 14%. Digital track sales were up 2% last week and were 45% higher than the same week last year For the year, digital tracks are up 48%. High School Musical (Disney) was the only album over 100,000 scans last week. It debuted big with sales of 615,000 (10% digital).

• French ISP Neuf Cegetel will introduce a music subscription service in a partnership with Universal Music Group. Subscribers will get unlimited access to UMG music of only one genre; eight additional genres will cost Euros 4.99. Tracks will contain DRM protection and expire when the consumer's subscription expires. (Mark Mulligan's blog)

• The Rolling Stones catalog will be released in MP3 format first at London-based 7digital. Twenty-four albums will be available at 320 kbps rate. For the first four weeks they will be specially priced at £5.49 ($11.00) each and then will rise to the normal £7.99 ($16.00) rate. (Billboard.biz)

• gBox, which is part of Universal Music Group's MP3 plans, has officially launched. The gBox Gifting Widget allows users to customize a wishlish within a widget that can be placed on blogs, social networks and personal websites. gBox also has a deal with digital distributor IODA. (Press release and a previous Coolfer post)

• Sony BMG chairman Andy Lack is on the board of directors of Building B, which just secured $17.5 million in funding. Building B offers a wireless set-top box and service that competes with Slingbox and Apple TV. (Red Herring)

• PassAlong Networks launched an upgrade to StoreBlocks, its digital music incentive platform. New features include a new marketing platform for incentive marketing firms. StoreBlocks now has 2.1 million songs in the MP3 format. (Press release)

• The worst take on Wal-Mart's MP3 downloads comes from The Motley Fool. "Watch out, Apple," wrote Rick Aristotle Munarriz. If Wal-Mart becomes anything remotely close to a digital force, it will be due to a leveraging of its brand and physical retail strength. Wal-Mart's download store offers such a tepid user experience that it would take free or near-free downloads to steal iTunes shoppers. Side note: Apple closed up 5.35% yesterday. (Motley Fool)

• Not that it will impact sales much, but Pitchfork gave This Is Next, ADA's mass merchant-aimed indie rock collection a 0.0 rating. Matt LeMay called it "predictably lazy and disjointed," "totally dispensible," "a silly and ill-advised compendium of material freely available to anyone with the initiative to seek it out." But the review was a not a critique on the music as much as it was a (weak and uninformed) critique on ADA's marketing strategy. (Pitchfork)

• Universal Music Group's "legal" mixtape, Lethal Squad Mixtapes: Dose #1, has flop written all over it. Take away the cred and you take away the sales -- even with a $5 sticker price. (SOHH)