Slashdot Mirror
Wal-Mart Relaunches Online Music Store
ack154 writes "The latest competitor in the paid music download business will now open its 'doors,' as Walmart begins selling songs at 88 cents online. It had recently finished a three month testing period and now will open to everyone. According to CNN, however, they don't care so much about selling music, 'Analysts have said the goal for Wal-Mart is to bring more people to its Web site.' Maybe they're taking cue from Apple in trying to sell something (iPod) else by using a music store? Articles can be found at Reuters, CNN and others."
amichalo points out that this is really a re-entry, writing "The service was previously launched last December. No explanation as to the re-launch (cough-poor-sales-cough) other than the addition of exclusive artists."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Doubt it. I just did a quick search for a few bands I listen to.
KMDFM - no songs.
Front Line Assembly - no songs.
Slayer - two songs of some crappy various artists collection.
Revolting Cocks - no songs.
Cat Rapes Dog - no songs.
Noise Unit - no songs.
Rammstein - Three songs, two off the Lost Highway soundtrack, and one off a Depeche Mode tribute.
So if you like bubblegum pop, hiphop, and country, Wal-Marts the place to shop. Otherwise, no dice.
I don't think so. I specifically remember Walmart requiring the song list for Nirvana's In Utero to list the song "Rape Me" as "Waif Me" (Kobain's personal choice as replacement) before they'd sell it, but their online store lists it as "Rape Me".
WALMART.COM may from time to time amend, supplement or modify the terms of this Agreement. It is your responsibility to check these Terms of Service (available in the Music Downloads Help section) periodically for changes. Your continued use of the Service following the posting of changes will mean that you accept and agree to the changes. If you do not agree to be bound by the Agreement as amended, you must stop using the Service.
Also, looking at the useage terms
What are the restrictions on how I can use the music I download? By purchasing a music download, you are entitled to: * Download the music to 1 computer and back up music to 2 additional computers (see instructions below) * Make 10 burns to a CD * Make unlimited transfers to a portable device Microsoft Windows Media(R) Player 9 keeps track of the rights associated with each song. To back up your music, you will need to make copies of 1) the song files, and 2) the license files and transfer these to the new computer. Your song files are available in the place where you download your music. To back up license files, in Windows Media Player go to the Tools menu and click on License Management. You will see a dialogue box asking you where you want to store the license backup files. Click the "Back up Now" button to save the license files to this location. Then transfer the license files to the new computer. Please refer to the instructions in the Windows Media Player's help system for more information on backing up and restoring music to a computer.
Of course you could re rip from the CD's and convert into the format of your choice, but that is an extra step, and I personally wouldn't pay for a service that doesn't allow me to easily do whatever I wish, with the data on my computer.
If anybody sees the usage policy involved, they would certainly think twice. Media Player 9 only, need connection for first time played, must be played within 120 days to activate, can only burn CD's with Media player 9, cannot burn in any other format. Is this the norm? I can't believe people would not be put off by this.
Stay tuned for new sig...
I hate to sound like a broken record, but *if* they were to ever drop their restrictive DRM and go with AAC, or something similar, I would darken their doorstep. Otherwise, I don't care if you offer .wma files for a penny a piece, they're not worth the space on my hard drive.
The only people that will ever succeed in online music stores will be those that offer decent DRM that is fair to both the fan and artist alike.
Get a clue Smiley yellow happy face guy
--pete
WMA, and requires Windows Media Player 9.
To quote their website:
(Sorry, no Mac or Linux.)
Sorry, guys, you'll get no money from me!
(Not like I shopped there, anyway.)
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
actually, no, you can't buy your favorite death metal at all.
according to tech tv, wal-mart had pretty crappy selection oustide of popular mucic. With the upgrade, they've added a few exclusive country titles, but for death metal, you're still screwed (censored or not).
whorray?!??!
i'm scared of anything that wal-mart puts online after seeing their fantabulous "walmart connect" internet service. Imagine the old free ISPs like net-zero (with the movies that run while you connect) being genetically spliced with AOL 2.0, and then crapped all over by that happy wal-mart smiley face. then imagine that they make you pay for it.
** Chigusaaa!!! You're the coolest girl in the WORLD!!! **
From their download site:
What does a song marked "(Edited)" mean?
An "edited" song is an alternate version of a song that has been recorded without explicit lyrics.
I'm the urban spaceman babe, but here comes the twist... I don't exist
If you live in a state where Wal-Mart has a physical store location you MUST pay sales tax. At 7% sales tax, the song will cost 95 cents.
I'm a proud user of the Wal-Mart DVD rental service (Net-Flix basically)
I don't have any problem with it at all. The movies get delivered fast, and the one time that I had a problem, I went on-line and clicked the "I did not receive this movie" button, and two days later it was at my door.
So, not everything Walmart touches turns to crap.
Oh- I've also gotten a lot of digital pictures printed by them- they did a great job, and it was cheap and easy...just the way I like it.
No reason to lie.
Yes.
/ ch ronicle/archive/2004/03/24/BUG855Q1831.DTL&type=bu siness
Like the retail outlets, the online store will adhere to Wal-Mart's policy of not selling songs that carry parental advisory labels and instead offer the clean radio-play versions, Lin said.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=
Woe be on to them, all who rise against poor people, shall perish in a the end. Buju Banton
The LA Times did an excellent series on Walmart's
negative effects on US manufacturers, overseas suppliers, its own workers, and the US economy last year. It was sparked by the impending entry of Walmart into the Southern California grocery market. Which also indirectly caused the painful, drawn out strike by workers at other grocery chains there.
But my favorite story on Walmart I've read so far (other than the lady who was nearly killed last year in the scramble for a cheap dvd player) is Fast Company's analysis of the company's effect on US manfacturers.
It starts, oddly, with a jar of pickles. And talks about how getting a distribution deal with Walmart eventually undermines and nearly destroys the Vlasic pickle company, due to savage cost cuts forced by Walmart, and undermining of the company's brand-image as they moved to selling big, cheap jars of pickles.
Along the way, the article shows how Walmart forces US manufacturers to move overseas, and even advises them on how to do it.
\
I just was surfing through the music archive.. and check this out!
.. Thus keeping the old concept of "I bought the CD cuz' I heard the song on the radio" alive on the net.. very tricky...
Excerpt from the tracklisting on the CD "Dirty Vegas - Dirty Vegas"
1. I Should Know - Listen - 6:13 - $0.88
2. Ghosts - Listen - 5:22 - $0.88
3. Lost Not Found - Listen - 4:08 - $0.88
4. Days Go By - Listen - 7:12 - Song only available with album download.
5. Etc.. Etc..
WHOA! They take the main hit track off the CD, and not let you purchase that one individually... make you buy the whole CD! (Apparantly because that track would be the only REASON people would by the CD)
Anyone else noticed any other albums exhibiting this pattern?
Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves? -Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
You may have missed the headline, but a couple weeks ago obesity passed smoking as the leading preventable cause of death.
As much as I hate censorship in music (I guess you could say I have a stake in keeping music from being censored), I have to tell you that Walmart edits nothing, and neither does Blockbuster. They may refuse to sell an album or rent a video with content/rating they don't like, but ultimately it's the label or the artist themselves who edit the music and submit it for sale. It depends on the artist's contract.
We all know Walmart sucks, but they sell 25% of the music sold in this country. That gives them (and likewise blockbuster in movies) a huge influence. Unfortunately, artists have to compromise to get their creations to a massive audience
As an artist, given the choice of making millions or standing up for our creativity, I think you know what most of us would do.
The Internet was supposed to turn the tables on this stuff, unfortunately it's merely propagating more of the same practices. If I'm not on iTunes, and not on walmart's catalog, how will a high school student in Bent Fork, Illinois ever get to hear or buy my record?
"At what point does the lowering of the price of downloadable music approaching the practice of dumping? Similar to what the USA constantly accuses foreign memory chip or timber companies of doing? Is wal-mart using its monolopy on low end merchandise to sibsidize its entry into the music business to the detriment of competition?"
When Wal-Mart started doing this with CDs in the stores, the record companies came to the aid of specialty retailers like Tower Records by giving them co-op advertising money in exchange for doing MAPs. Wal-Mart complained to the government, the government told the record companies to stop doing it, and Slashdotters cheered. Tower Records, which provides a higher selection of uncensored music but simply cannot compete with Wal-Mart on pricing, subsequently filed for bankrupcty.
Seems to me that Wal-Mart's predatory pricing should make them heros to the typical Slashdotter.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
b) i get to use some handcuff microsoft monoply DRM schema instead of the aptly named "Fairplay" DRM from itunes.
[from Walmart]
What are the restrictions on how I can use the music I download?
By purchasing a music download, you are entitled to:
Download the music to 1 computer and back up music to 2 additional computers (see instructions below)
Make 10 burns to a CD
Make unlimited transfers to a portable device
[from iTunes]
In a nutshell, your FairPlay agreement entitles you to:
play your music on up to three computers (and enjoy unlimited synching with iPods),
allows unlimited burning for individual songs and
lets you burn unchanged playlists up to 10 times each.
Except for AAC v WMA, iTunes v browser, Apple v Microsoft/Walmart, they sound quite similar.
But we'd never let facts get in the way of a good opportunity to get modded up by slamming MS, would we?
The song you downloaded was not protected with any DRM. That's why it worked. But buy a song (which has DRM) and you'll see that MPlayer isn't so magical anymore.
If you read reviews for mp3 players on places like CNET, you'll see that lots of people use WMA files. I don't, personally, but I can see how some people would because using WMP to rip their CDs is easier than putting up with MusicMatch's artificially slowed ripping in the free version, or playing around with Winamp to make it into an mp3 encoder, before finally getting around to discovering a program like CDex. Lots of mp3 players support WMA, as it is. Mine is RCA's first Lyra and is thusly fairly old, and it can play WMA files just fine.
12. Enforcement of These Terms of Service.
[...] You agree that WALMART.COM has the right, without liability to you, to disclose any Registration Data and/or Account information to law enforcement authorities, government officials, and/or a third party , as WALMART.COM believes is reasonably necessary or appropriate to enforce and/or verify compliance with any part of this Agreement (including but not limited to WALMART.COM's right to cooperate with any legal process relating to your use of the Service and/or Products, and/or a third party claim that your use of the Service and/or Products is unlawful and/or infringes such third party's rights).
(emphasis added)
Interesting (in essence, that's "we can pretty much do whatever we damn well please with the data we connect about you and you can't do a thing about it")...
The sample songs are not DRM'd. It wouldn't be until you actually bought a song you'd find out it wouldn't work.
Encrypted WMAs do not work on my linux box
Encrypted WMAs do not work on my personal MP3 CD player
Encrypted WMAs do not work on my MP3 CD Player in the living room.
If I need MP3 why are they keeping trying to sell something else?
Most of the music industry hates the MP3 standard because they cannot count each time a song is listened to with it, they have rights over copying and they want to count each time a song is copied from a medium to ram for play. This is ridicoulous. To stay in business they want to difform the spirit of an old law.
At least they understand at warp records:
http://www.warprecords.com/bleep/
"I'm a proud user of the Wal-Mart DVD rental service (Net-Flix basically)"
If you are happy with the business model, why not try the original, NetFlix?
NetFlix has the larger amount of titles, they'll have more special interest than Wal-Mart, they won't be edited like Wal-Mart, and you won't be surprised if you receive a full-frame version (since we know Wal-Mart prefers that) instead of a widescreen edition?
It seems to me if there is a better competitor out there, you might ought to give your business to them instead of a huge wage-depressing monolith like Wal-Mart.
Then again, I'm a NetFlix subscriber. A majority Windows PC user but favors OS X, and TiVo subscriber. Oh yeah, I own the Xbox too, but that's the only thing Microsoft does right (see Xbox Live)...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
There's very little serious music--opera, "Classical", traditional jazz, sacred--to be had there, other than the "top 20"
Best Buy can have you arrested
All hail FatWallet:
Here are some legal (in Russia!) MP3 download sites - most flat fee:
allofmp3.com
This site is locally legit and songs can be downloaded for as little as $0.01 per MB. That's around 3 cents per song.
DELit
Unusual emphasis on hard rock and metal acts (east European and Russian youth apparently worship metal acts)
3MP3.ru
$4.55 per month for unlimited downloads.
And you are not stuck with the typical iTMS low-quality 128Kbit file. Most of the Russian sites let you choose your quality and give you the option to do "online encoding" where you can select the settings you want. When the pop up screen shows up you can hit switch to advanced mode toward the bottm and you get the following options:
You can choose between the LAME or BLADE codec and 128, 160, 192, 256, and 320 kbps for each (constant bitrate). Or you can choose LAME variable bitrate at 128, 160, 192, or 256.
If you enjoy these services, 3MP3 should be your first stop to see if you can find what you are looking for at the lowest price. Then I'd move to allofmp3, followed by clubmp3.ru, and then DELit.
Da Blog
Also, there's a very important distinction between "Make 10 burns to a CD" (Wal-Mart) and "burn unchanged playlists up to 10 times each" (iTunes). With the former, a given song can only be burned 10 times, ever. With the latter, it's just that a particular playlist can be burned ten times before you have to change it. Any individual song can be burned to CD as many damn times as you please - and even a playlist can be burned more than ten times, so long as you change it every ten burns. This can be as simple as changing a single track (adding one, deleting one, changing order, whatever) - and you can then change it right back if you like. Effectively, then, you can even burn the same whole playlist as many times as you like; you simply have to intervene at least once every ten burns. This is just so you don't set a machine to mass duplicate 100 copies or whatever of a playlist and walk off, come back, and start handing out copies of that playlist to a hundred strangers. You can still do essentially that, but you have to at least intervene; apparently that's considered just enough of an annoyance factor that they don't worry about people doing it.
Between those two things, the iTunes service is ultimately much less restrictive - you can burn songs as many times as you like (as opposed to just ten), and you can have whatever three computers you want each have full privileges for the music, and can change them around whenever you like (as opposed to having full privs on just one of the three machines, and being unable to change the machines when you replace one).
Just wait until a few more get lost and they freeze your account and start accusing you of stealing the movies and make you start an investigation through the post office that never gets anywhere. Bitter? Nah. I'm much happier now with my Blockbuster Freedom Pass and I cycle through movies more quickly than I could have with either Netflix or Walmart's by-mail service.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
> mph... '"serious" music...'
Oooh, glad you brought that up...
"Serious music", of course, means polyphony -- true polyphony, not that
half-baked monody stuff everyone's so eager to write these days, but real
polyphony, with multiple independent or interdependent voices, e.g. fugue.
It's hard to take music seriously if all it's got is one melody part and
some supporting harmony parts. That takes, what, two minutes per measure
to write? Lazy bums.
Yeah, go ahead and mod me as Funny, nevermind that I'm actually mostly serious.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.