Walmart Pulls Plug on MP3 Store, Did You Know It Had One?
Walmart Pulls Plug on MP3 Store, Did You Know It Had One?
Posted 08/11/2011 at 7:05am
| by Paul Lilly
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Hey, guess what? Walmart has an MP3 store! Some of you already know that, and for others, you're just now finding out. There's a good chance the latter outnumbers the former, which would help explain why Walmart is closing its MP3 store by the end of the month. Or maybe music listeners were just too settled with iTunes, Amazon, and other music marts to pluck MP3s from Wally World.
Walmart's original strategy in the MP3 arena was to undercut iTunes' pricing and sell songs at $0.88 per track when it launched in late 2003, 11 cents cheaper than iTunes at the time, The New York Times explains. Prices have gone up on both sides, but it's still generally cheaper to buy an MP3 from Walmart than it is through iTunes. So why shut the service down? Good question, and here's your coyly penned answer.
"We recently notified our music partners that we've made a business decision to no longer offer MP3 digital tracks as of August 29, 2011," Walmart said in a statement.
NYT pinged Walmart for further clarification and was given the cold shoulder in return.
Where do you buy your MP3s from?
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Holly Golightly
August 11, 2011 at 10:27pm
I sort of download MP3s... Well, it goes like this, I use the Zune Pass to download as many songs I want to listen to. By the end of the month, I choose which 10 songs I want to keep, for free! So I could download 1 million songs for free, and 100% legit too! All I need to do is by a pass from Microsoft which is $15, but for only $15, I get to listen to millions of songs. I definitely say it is a fair trade. I was aware of Walmart's digital service, but I really do not like paying for every single song like I used to do on Amazon MP3, SnoCap, and BeatPort. The prices add up, and become expensive, so I found the Zune to be the most affordable legit solution.
livebriand
August 11, 2011 at 4:40pm
Being a student who tries to be cheap and doesn't have a lot of money, I typically just listen to Pandora and local radio stations for free. Occosionally I'll pirate it from a site like beemp3. I don't use bittorrent though due to the risk of getting caught.
SAND_CREATURE
August 11, 2011 at 8:37am
I like to buy CDs, but when I don't I get a lot of music from Guvera (guvera.com). It's a really cool service where advertisers pay for your music, meaning you get music for free. And yes, I did look this place up, and it is legitimate. I have to say that this is the one time that I had to turn off adblock and saw an ad that I actually clicked
Corfy
August 11, 2011 at 7:44am
I purchase most of my MP3s from either Amazon or Napster (never had a desire to use iTunes, somehow I keep forgetting about Wal-Mart's MP3 store). And I'm somewhat old-school in that I'm not against purchasing the physical CD and ripping my own MP3s (my last CD, Alpocalypse, was from the Wal-Mart store across the street from my office). Although I will say most of my MP3s actually come from Jamendo.com, but since those MP3s are free via the Creative Commons licenses, I don't consider those "purchased". But I would have to say that nearly 2 out of every 3 songs on my MP3 player are from Jamendo.
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