Wal-Mart to Launch Online Music Store

Dteyn writes "I heard on the radio today that Wal-Mart will soon be opening up an online music store to compete with the likes of Apple's iTunes and Napster. According to the radio newsguy, it's expected to be officially announced as early as next week. Looks like this 'digital music' thing is starting to catch on with the bigwigs. Finally."

Comments

Too....many......music download services

[dethl]

Why Wal-Mart, why? Isn't the industry flooded enough as is? Although Wal-Mart does make enough to offset the losses it will incur with the music service (as all music services do), its just another iTMS wannabe.

Re:Too....many......music download services

[SewersOfRivendell]

more will come into the market to compete with those, on a platform that PEOPLE want, not manufacturers

Not if you want music owned by the RIAA record trust. Competition requires the availability of more than one different product in the first place, and the only product these stores can offer is DRM-encrusted. The RIAA won't be giving that up anytime soon without a revolt from one of it's multinational members.

Good

[iPaqMan]

Now maybe a company with some real power can force the labels to reduce their rediculus pricing structure!

Do we need another?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do we really need another online music store? iTunes and Napster are great, they work well and have a rather large album of songs. Why add another store which will have the same set of songs?

Fortress of Insanity
Blogzine

Re:I own a Record Store

[Aliencow]

You don't sell "Sick Marilyn Manson" ?
What's so sick about him?
The fact he knows how to market the fuck out of his stuff ?
Cop killer rap... Rap lyrics ever killed anyone? I know 50 cent fucking annoys me but I haven't died *yet*.
See guys, when you don't let kids play dodgeball cause it's bad for their self-esteem they turn into Christian music store owners.

How will it make money?

[paxcirca]

I'm confused as to what Walmart's impetus here is. Steve Jobs has very clearly stated that iTMS makes about squat for profit; it's just a pretty Trojan Horse to get people to buy iPods (and eventually Macs). Walmart doesn't have an MP3 player (that I'm aware) to push. Selling music to get people to buy MP3 players seems a bit more plausible than, say, selling music to get people to buy tires/clothing/cereal in Walmart stores.

Re:How will it make money?

[SEE]

Wal-Mart has one major thing Apple doesn't:

Leverage.

Wal-Mart already sells a massive volume of music. That gives them the leverage to drive down the record company cut of sales. "I think we'll have to cut our CD pre-orders if you can't bend on your cut of the download sales" is an incredibly useful threat to be able to use at the bargaining table.

And forget just CD orders. How many of the major labels are owned by companies that sell other things retail? Sony sells electronics. Sony, Time Warner, and Vivendi Universal sell DVDs. Wal-Mart's purchasing power, as the #1 retailer in the U.S., is tremendous on those things, too.

And if Wal-Mart can just get better "invoicing" terms than Apple gets, that can make it profitable just on the interest earned on the consumer's money between sale and paying the record company.

And we would use it because...?

[evn]

The article is pretty vague. Wal-mart is going to start an online music store to compete with other services which have been successful. Unless they can offer something darn impressive I think they'll have a hard time getting it out the door.

Apple offers you iTunes - excellent music software that people actually want to use (just look at the number of non-US downloads for proof).

Napster 2 offers...well, it's got plenty of name recognition - the music selection/pricing scheme is a little different and the format works on a variety of players.

The other services (buymusic, napster, pressplay...) haven't had near the success of the iTMS. Unless walmart has some sort of killer feature that people are actually asking for they're doomed to be another smalltime player.

what could that feature be?
- Lossless files
- No DRM/Regular MP3
- Extremely cheap pricing ($.10 - $.50)
- EVERY major artist/song represented (and more indie tracks too)
Without one of those it's just more of the same, and there is no reason for consumers to choose walmart's startup over the much more popular ITMS or the much more established napster.

Re:And we would use it because...?

[Shakrai]

Lossless files

That would be nice. C'mon boys what is all this broadband for after all? I'd rather spend half an hour or 45 minutes downloading 650 megs of lossless music (rough guess on my 3mbit RR download) then take a trip to the store to buy a CD. And that's the worst case scenario. You could use lossless compression to cut down a 650 meg CD by quite a bit I suspect. How well does that data compress?

No DRM/Regular MP3

Not going to happen as long as RIAA controls things... any other viewpoint is naive :( Not that I don't completely agree with you...

Extremely cheap pricing ($.10 - $.50)

Of all my complaints with iTMS (mainly DRM, but also the system resource hog that iTunes seems to be), I can't argue with the prices. Sure cheaper is always better, but $0.99 is pretty reasonable imho.

EVERY major artist/song represented (and more indie tracks too)

That's the biggest thing I think. There are several of my mp3s that I've been unable to find on iTMS. C'mon, what's the Internet for if we can't have instant access to every piece of music ever created by human beings in any language?

wal-mart will

[hansoloaf]

have the website designed in China and maintained by illegal immigrants in the USA.

A minor drawback

[fleener]

A minor drawback to online sales is that there will never be surplus discounts. If I can pay 50 cents a song, great, it won't matter. If not, well, I'm accustomed to paying $10 for a CD in the bargain barrel (and liking most of the songs) or $5 at a used CD shop. There is no need or cause for liquidation sales online and no way (?) to sell used electronic music without causing a big flap.

A spreading phenomenon

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like the AIDS and Linux viruses are spreading because of homosexuals, the downloading of music spread very fast with so many people stealing intellectual property for their personal enjoyment. Interestingly, social perversion also attracts business minded people.

Goddamn it slashdot!

[crapulent]

Would you please quit linking to the NY Post as a "news source"? The last time this happened was when the NY Post was claiming that McDonalds would be giving away a billion iTunes songs... which turned out to be completely untrue, an unfounded rumour.

For the love of god, stop linking to tabloids as news! If it's reported somewhere respectable then fine, but it's not a story until you've got more than this pathetic 200 word paragraph from some grocery store checkout RAG.

Re:Also makes you wonder.....

[mackstann]

No thanks. I prefer listening to music.

Not that I'm a Marilyn Manson fan, but this method of declaring some music you don't like "not music" is just stupid. The funny thing is that the music that has been called "not music" in the past has very often become some of the most popular and influential music around. Elvis, KISS, ACDC, Black Sabbath, rap/hip-hop in general, etc.

Software? Wal-Mart? No thanks.

[slyckshoes]

Apple has experience writing Operating Systems and other various software. They have experience dealing with artist type folks (musicians, graphic artists, etc) and they also deal with hard core nerds. They have a darn good idea of what to put in an online music store and how to design/code it for scalability, high-availability, and etc. They also make hardware, which gives them another benefit and even more credibility in my book.

What does Wal-Mart have experience with? They make flyers. And cheesy commercials. I imagine they'll hire a team to build it for them, but I'm just not convinced that someone who has little experience with software can make a music store that has the things I want. I may try it out, but Apple has my loyalty for being the first to market and doing it well.

Re:Irony

[nerph]

"..because it's such cheap advertisement..."

For what? Their concerts and merchandise?

Concerts:
1. What good is global distribution for a small band that only plays small clubs locally?
2. Even for a big-name band, it's damn near impossible to organize a single large-venue concert without the backing of a major label and concert promoter. Pearl Jam tried a few years ago and couldn't pull it off.

So marketing your concerts by giving music away doesn't really help. There are some labels like Wind-Up that make their band's singles available for download, which to me has always been a great compromise.

Merchandise:
1. A band is lucky if 1% of the people who buy their albums actually buy merchandise as well. Once you start giving your music away that percentage will not scale with the number of people downloading the song (i.e. 100 x more listeners 100 x more merch sales). Band margins on merch sales is significant but is hardly enough to support the production of new songs.
2. OK, there is no #2.

The caveat to the above (and this has been speculated elsewhere), is that bands may begin to focus a lot more on singles and we may find ourselves back in the days of the 45 where bands only released singles with B-sides.