Walmart Music Downloads

» see walmart.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Walmart has never operated a store in Turkey. That makes a Walmart music store a doubly foreign object from here: an online shop bolted to a retail chain that existed for me only as a word in American news stories about small towns losing their main streets. The licensing was territorial anyway, the way every download store of that era was.

The store went into beta in December 2003 and opened properly on 23 March 2004. Tracks were 88 cents against Apple's 99, albums $9.44 against Apple's $9.99. The files were Windows Media at 128 kbps with Microsoft's DRM wrapped around them, which meant they would not play on an iPod, which meant the price advantage was pointed squarely at people who did not own the only music player anybody wanted.

The strategy was the one Walmart used on everything else it sold. Undercut the market price and let volume do the rest. Music turned out not to work that way. The constraint was the device the file would play on, and Walmart's files did not play on the device everybody had.

It never got close. iTunes held the hardware and therefore the customer, and when Amazon opened its own MP3 store in 2007 it took most of what was left over.

~ the dossier ~

~ eighty-eight cents ~

The price held for years and the format did not. Walmart started selling MP3s alongside the WMA files in August 2007 and went MP3-only in February 2008, dropping DRM before Apple had finished doing the same across its own catalog. The MP3s were 256 kbps and cost 94 cents, six cents under iTunes Plus. For roughly a year, Walmart had the better technical product: higher bitrate and no restrictions, for less money.

It did not matter. By then the people who cared about DRM had already sorted themselves into Amazon customers, and the people who did not care had an iPod.

~ the october that nearly took the libraries ~

On 26 September 2008 Walmart emailed its download customers to say that from 9 October it would stop supporting DRM for the WMA files it had sold between 2004 and early 2008. In practice that meant the license servers were going off. A file already on your machine kept playing until you changed computers or reinstalled Windows, at which point it would ask for a license that nobody was left to issue.

The reaction was immediate and loud. Gizmodo and Boing Boing ran it as the definitive argument against buying protected files at all: the only people at risk of losing their music were the ones who had paid for it.

On 9 October, the day the servers were meant to go dark, Walmart sent a second email saying that based on customer feedback it had decided to keep the DRM servers running for the present time. It kept them running until the store itself closed, and went on supporting the old files after that.

~ the last week ~

The announcement came in the first week of August 2011 and the store closed on 29 August. Walmart said it would keep helping customers manage the WMA files they already owned, which by then was the only obligation left standing. Physical disc sales on walmart.com carried on, and so did Soundcheck, the label-funded promo site, which outlived the store it had been built to feed.

Seven years and eight months. Walmart went back to selling the discs, which it is still doing.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »