“Once upon a time, Walmart was an ‘iTunes-killer’ with deeply-discounted, 88-cent MP3s,” Digital Music News reports. “But discounts meant little compared to integrated iPod and iPhone integration, a superior iTunes user interface, and the tether created by stored credit cards (which Apple does well).”
“Walmart is now closing its MP3 download store,” DMN reports. “The following certified letter was recently sent to distribution and licensing partners, and shared exclusively with Digital Music News.”
After eight years in business, the Walmart Music Downloads Store located at mp3.walmart.com will close on August 28, 2011. All content in the Store will be disabled and no longer available for download from the store. The sale of physical record music products on Walmart.com as well as in Walmart US retail stores will remain unaffected. Walmart Soundcheck (soundcheck.walmart.com) will remain operational as a live streaming site without any download options.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: iTunes, killer.
For how long Wal-Mart will maintain their DRM servers is anybody’s guess. If, for some reason, you have some of these DRM’ed Wal-Mart WMA files that you care about, you might want to look into stripping off that DRM.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]
Related articles:
More blood on Apple iTunes Store’s play button: Nokia pulls plug on ‘Comes With Music’ – January 17, 2011
More blood on Apple iTunes Store’s play button: Sky Songs is dead – December 08, 2010
More blood on Apple iTunes Store’s play button: SpiralFrog croaks – March 19, 2009
More blood on Apple iTunes Store’s play button: Total Music is dead – February 11, 2009
More blood on Apple iTunes Store’s play button: Ruckus is dead – February 08, 2009
More blood on Apple iTunes Store’s play button: Starz pulls plug on ‘Vongo’ – August 13, 2008
More blood on Apple iTunes Store’s play button: Yahoo! Music Store is dead – July 24, 2008
More blood on Apple iTunes Store’s play button: Yahoo shutters online music subscription service – February 04, 2008
More blood on Apple iTunes Store’s play button: Wal-Mart pulls plug on movie download store – December 27, 2007
More blood on Apple iTunes Store’s play button: Virgin Digital is dead – September 24, 2007
More blood on Apple iTunes Store’s play button: MTV’s Urge is dead – August 21, 2007
More blood on Apple iTunes Store’s play button: Google pulls plug on Google Video – August 13, 2007
More blood on Apple iTunes Store’s play button: Sony disconnects Connect – June 17, 2007
More blood on Apple iTunes Store’s play button: AOL Music Now folds – January 12, 2007
More blood on Apple iTunes Store’s play button: Virgin shutters U.S. music service – January 05, 2007
More blood on Apple iTunes Store’s play button: MSN Music stops selling music downloads – November 03, 2006
More blood on Apple iTunes Store’s play button: Japan’s Oricon bows out – November 01, 2006
More blood on Apple iTunes Store’s play button: Tower Records liquidated – October 09, 2006
More blood on Apple iTunes Music Store’s play button: MyCokeMusic is dead – June 20, 2006
Apple’s iTunes Music Store has blood on its play button: BuyMusic.com is dead – March 28, 2004
What? Walmart sold digital music online?
maybe it was one of those russian sites that killed them?
I guess they didn’t or the store would still be open .
I had No idea Wal-mart sold digital music! They’ve been open for 8 years & I’ve never even seen an ad?! Wow.
nothing quite has the caché of having Wal-mart grafted on to the name of a music service
I guess Sam sung the last Sam’s Club song here and in Europe. Put the Tab on me, Sam.
Really shows how powerful Apple is…goodness lol.
I can’t remember, is this the third or fourth time Walmart closed its online music store?
Then all this time I’ve waited in vain for pictures of 800-pound, breast-tattooed, redneck trailer trash in pink leotards sitting under their Jiffy Pop smoke detectors downloading Walmart mp3s to their Dells running IE6.
So I am to be upset that Wal-Mart did poorly on it’s iTunes Killer that they boasted would overtake Apple’s music sales in less then a year after the offering.
NOT… It’s freaking Wal-Mart the destroyer of local small business.
Wally world has more blood on it’s hands then any other company next to the tobacco industry, They couldn’t strong arm Apple due to it’s piss poor deployment.
Wal-marts music service was poorly done, and that’s the whole problem with them, cheap fast and crappy.
No wonder they failed.
Wow, it’s been eight years since Wal-Mart opened their digital music store? I remember the digital music retail wars playing out right here on MDN, as each week revealed another new player that was going to wipe the floor with the iTunes Music Store. BuyMusic.com, Wal-Mart, Sony…
And so many of these competitors were Windows-only, because really, who cared about the miniscule number of Mac users? The Mac was irrelevant, didn’t you know? Windows stores selling Microsoft digital audio formats were sure to win — they had it in the bag.
Of course, we all know how it turned out. And at the same time, the same story was playing out with the iPod. (And will probably happen again with the iPad.)
——RM
Another “Plays for Sure” moment, this time courtesy of Walmart. Another DRM nightmare for customers.
Who was that who championed DRM-free music? That’s right, Steve Jobs. Meanwhile, Walmart wasted 8 years and probably a lot of money.
Bub-Bye
Oh CRAP!!! and I was just about to NOT-buy the latest MURS album from the Walmart online music store…that i didn’t know existed…that had like 12 titles…and wasn’t relevant…and sucked.
Didn’t the music executives try to break Apple by offering DRM free music to Walmart but not Apple?
They finally realized that their mp3 music store wasn’t poaching customers from Apple, but rather from their more profitable brick store CD customers and teaching them how to download from the internet, and later from Apple.
No wonder they pulled the plug.