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.

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?